Architect Albert Frey (1903–1998) saw a modernist utopia in the desert. Born in Zurich, he studied in Europe with Le Corbusier before moving to the United States in 1930, convinced it was the land of architectural opportunity. On a visit to Palm Springs, he fell under the desert spell. It was here, amid the arid and empty landscape, that he could truly envisage a perfect modern future. Like fellow Californian luminary, John Lautner, Frey would spend the rest of his career nurturing the consonan...
Since 2004 Gavin Stamp, one of Britain's most eminent and readable architectural historians, has written a monthly column for Apollo, the esteemed architecture and fine art magazine. The subject is simply whatever in design or architecture happens to take his fancy. It might be the splendid reopening of the magnificent Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras Station, or the dilapidation of a little-known church in Eastbourne; the much-lamented demise of the original Routemaster bus, or the colossal ma...
The city of a thousand minarets is also the city of eclectic modern constructions, turn-of-the-century revivalism and romanticism, concrete expressionism, and modernist design. Yet while much has been published on Cairo's ancient, medieval, and early-modern architectural heritage, the city's modern architecture has to date not received the attention it deserves. Cairo since 1900: An Architectural Guide is the first comprehensive architectural guide to the constructions that have shaped and conti...
A dazzling dual portrait of Frank Lloyd Wright and early twentieth-century New York, revealing the city's role in establishing the career of America's most famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) took his first major trip to New York in 1909, fleeing a failed marriage and artistic stagnation. He returned a decade later, his personal life and architectural career again in crisis. Booming 1920s New York served as a refuge, but it also challenged him and resurrected his career. The city c...
Hampstead Garden Suburb was founded by Dame Henrietta Barnett and was described as a nearly perfect example of the English invention. This edition features an account of the Suburb, and sets architectural and planning achievements in context, historically and socially. It also paints a picture of both the vision and reality of 'Henrietta's Dream'.
The Art Deco style, named after the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts, reached its peak in the 1920s. A new artistic language driven by a formidable vital impulse born of recent peace, left its mark on urban and domestic architecture, but also on all forms of design: furniture, mural painting, glassware, ceramics. This book offers a magnificently illustrated panorama of this ornamental aesthetic, which blend into the world's artistic landscape with materials as luxurious as lacquer, iv...
The Modern Architecture Symposia, 1962-1966 (Temple Hoyne Buell Center (YAL))
In a series of three symposia at Columbia University in the 1960s, leading scholars and critics gathered to re-examine the architecture of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s and assess its scope and significance anew. Chaired by Henry-Russell Hitchcock with the support of Philip Johnson, the Modern Architecture Symposia marked a pivotal moment in the reappraisal of early modern architecture and its historiography during the late modern period. This book contains the symposia's formal papers and informa...
The theme of “modernity” was the launching pad for architecture in the 20th century, to the point of completely revolutionising our way of life. By causing in its development absolutisations and misunderstandings, actual motives linked to the profound desire to improve everyone’s life were reconsidered. Against the theory that the 20th century connected the objective of modernity to that of the Modern Movement, this book deals with the theme of a present continuity by revealing those “open visio...
City for Children (Historical Studies of Urban America (CHUP)) (Historical Studies of Urban America)
by Marta Gutman
While the dynamic urban landscapes of New York, Boston, and Chicago have been widely studied, there is much to be gleaned from west coast cities, especially in California, where the migration boom at the end of the nineteenth century permanently changed the urban fabric of these newly diverse, plural metropolises. In A City for Children, Marta Gutman focuses on the use and adaptive reuse of everyday buildings in Oakland, California, to make the city a better place for children. She introduces us...
It was the era of the Raj, and yet A Joint Enterprise reveals the unexpected role of native communities in the transformation of the urban fabric of British Bombay from 1854 to 1918. Preeti Chopra demonstrates how British Bombay was, surprisingly, a collaboration of the colonial government and the Indian and European mercantile and industrial elite who shaped the city to serve their combined interests. Chopra shows how the European and Indian engineers, architects, and artists worked with each o...
Koepriyet: Republican Heritage Bridges of Turkey
by Hulya Sonmez Schaap
Koepriyet: Republican Heritage Bridges of Turkey deals with bridges and the construction industry of Turkey during the foundation of the Republic between 1923-1940. The book provides a brief summary of the bridge history of the country, but the main focus is on the early republic era. During this period, the bridge-building technique was reborn in a country undergoing a radical transformation. Turkey changed its ruling, secularized and changed its alphabet. In addition to detailed descriptions...
Imperial Islands (Perspectives on the Global Past)
When the USS Maine mysteriously exploded in Havana’s harbor on February 15, 1898, the United States joined local rebel forces to avenge the Maine and "liberate" Cuba from the Spanish empire. "Remember the Maine! To Hell with Spain!" so went the popular slogan. Little did the Cubans know that the United States was not going to give them freedom-in less than a year the American flag replaced the Spanish flag over the various island colonies of Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Spurred...
Silver Award Winner, 2016 Nautilus Book Award in Young Adult (YA) Non-Fiction Moving beyond the familiar accounts of politics and the achievements of celebrity engineers and designers, Building the Golden Gate Bridge is the first book to primarily feature the voices of the workers themselves. This is the story of survivors who vividly recall the hardships, hazards, and victories of constructing the landmark span during the Great Depression. Labor historian Harvey Schwartz has compiled oral his...
A lavishly illustrated exploration of forward-looking Czech art around the turn of the twentieth century. Though it’s less widely heralded than Berlin and Vienna, 1890s Prague was every bit as much a fin-de-siècle cultural center as its Mittel European peers. At the end of the nineteenth century, the city found itself home to a fervent coterie of young visual artists all deliberately pushing against—indeed, seeking to secede from—the traditional artistic structures of the day. This book...
The story of the Great Liners begins on the Atlantic route between the Old World and the New, between Europe and the United States. It was the most prestigious, most progressive and certainly most competitive ocean liner run of all time. It was on the North Atlantic that the largest, fastest and indeed grandest passenger ships were created. In this book, William Miller concentrates for the most part on these Atlantic superliners. It has been a race, sometimes fierce, that has continued for well...
Air-Conditioning in Modern American Architecture, 1890-1970 (Buildings, Landscapes, and Societies, #11)
by Joseph M. Siry
Air-Conditioning in Modern American Architecture, 1890-1970, documents how architects made environmental technologies into resources that helped shape their spatial and formal aesthetic. In doing so, it sheds important new light on the ways in which mechanical engineering has been assimilated into the culture of architecture as one facet of its broader modernist project. Tracing the development and architectural integration of air-conditioning from its origins in the late nineteenth century to...
A compelling call to apply Buckminster Fuller's creative problem-solving to present-day problems. A self-professed "comprehensive anticipatory design scientist," the inventor Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was undoubtedly a visionary. Fuller's creations often bordered on the realm of science fiction, ranging from the freestanding geodesic dome to the three-wheel Dymaxion car to a bathroom requiring neither plumbing nor sewage. Yet in spite of his brilliant mind and life-long devotion to servin...
In 1893, the year that marked the four hundredth anniversary of the landing of Columbus in the New World, Chicago was host to an exposition to mark the occasion. Although the World's Columbian Exposition was the fifteenth world's fair, it was of vastly greater scope than any of its predecessors. Chicago created a veritable new city. It was not only larger than any previous exposition but also more elaborately designed, more precisely laid out, more fully realized, and more prophetic. It was the...