This volume offers both an introduction to and an insight into key contemporary architects as well as giving a snapshot of the varied nature of architecture today. For each architect there are details of their life and work and illustrations of their most representative and iconic buildings.
Key Modern Architects provides an accessible and thought-provoking introduction to the work of the most significant architects of the modern era. Fifty short chapters introduce fifty key architects, from Le Corbusier to Aldo Van Eyck to Zaha Hadid, exploring their most influential buildings and developing a critique of each architect's work within a broader cultural and historical context. The selection represents the most influential architects working from 1890 to the present, those most likely to be taught on survey courses in modern architectural history, along with some lesser-known names with an equal claim to influence. Emphasis is placed on a critical and interpretative approach, allowing the student to position each architect in a cultural and intellectual context quickly and easily. Artistic, technical, social, and intellectual developments are brought to the fore – built and unbuilt projects, writings and influences. This approach brings to light the ideology behind architectural work, offering insights into each architect's working practice. - Helps students to develop a critical approach to understanding modern architectural history. - One chapter per architect – meaning chapters may be read individually as a concise resource for the study of an architect, or together as a coherent book-length history of the whole period of modern architecture. - Chapters are supported by boxed lists of each architect's most significant projects, along with suggestions for further reading as a springboard to further study and research. Combining the clarity and accessibility of a textbook with in-depth reading and a critical approach, Key Modern Architects provides an invaluable resource for both the classroom and for independent study in architectural and art history.
In this exceptional book on the London based studio 6a architects, architecture critic Irenee Scalbert looks at the role of narrative, history, appropriation and craft in the work of Tom Emerson and Stephanie Macdonald. The book traces an architectural approach avoiding style, signature, theory and even concept in favour of metis, an ancient form of intelligence combining 'flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, opportunism, varied skills, and experience.' Structured around notions of situation, intervention, making, comedy, bricolage, chance and anthropology, the text is mirrored in a visual essay of archive photographs, artworks, film stills and recent projects by the practice.
The Modern movement began in the 1920s when a small group of young architects felt all that had gone before should be rejected and that architectural design should start afresh. This fresh start, they declared, should be based on modern technology and a new, modern approach to life. Their innovations became the 20th century's dominant movement in architecture, crystallizing into the international style of the 1920s and '30s. In "Exploding the Myths of Modern Architecture, " Malcolm Millais explores the forces and factors that led to the emergence of the Modern movement, arguing that it was based on completely false premises. Millais offers a rarely heard perspective on the Modern movement, explaining its failures and how the well-meaning "revolutionaries" behind it gained and maintained power.
Architects Philip Johnson, Marcel Breuer, Landis Gores, Eliot Noyes, Edward Durell Stone, and others created an extraordinary collection of modern houses in New Canaan, Connecticut, in the 1940s and 1950s. The bucolic New England town—a suburb of Manhattan—became the site of fervent experimentation by some of the leading lights of the movement in the United States, the architects known as the Harvard Five, whose modern aesthetic could be traced to the Bauhaus school of design. There they promoted their core principles: simplicity, openness, and sensitivity to site and nature, and built glass, wood, steel, and fieldstone houses that established architectural modernism as the ideal of domesticity in the twentieth century. Architects Jeffrey Matz and Cristina A. Ross, photographer Michael Biondo, and graphic designer Lorenzo Ottaviani present this vanishing generation of iconic American houses as more than an issue of restoration or preservation, but as an evolving legacy that adapts to contemporary life. Selecting a representative group of sixteen houses covering the period between the 1950s and 1978, they portray each one in great detail, with floor plans, timelines, and both archival and luminous new photography—from the clean, minimalist look of the initial construction, to subsequent additions by some of the most significant architects of our time including Toshiko Mori, Roger Ferris, and Joeb Moore. Voices of the architects and builders, original owners and current occupants combine to describe how the houses are enjoyed and lived in today, and how the modernist residence is more than just a philosophy of design and construction, but also a philosophy of living.
How climate influenced the design strategies of modernist architects Modern Architecture and Climate explores how leading architects of the twentieth century incorporated climate-mediating strategies into their designs, and shows how regional approaches to climate adaptability were essential to the development of modern architecture. Focusing on the period surrounding World War II—before fossil-fuel powered air-conditioning became widely available—Daniel Barber brings to light a vibrant and dynamic architectural discussion involving design, materials, and shading systems as means of interior climate control. He looks at projects by well-known architects such as Richard Neutra, Le Corbusier, Lúcio Costa, Mies van der Rohe, and Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and the work of climate-focused architects such as MMM Roberto, Olgyay and Olgyay, and Cliff May. Drawing on the editorial projects of James Marston Fitch, Elizabeth Gordon, and others, he demonstrates how images and diagrams produced by architects helped conceptualize climate knowledge, alongside the work of meteorologists, physicists, engineers, and social scientists. Barber describes how this novel type of environmental media catalyzed new ways of thinking about climate and architectural design. Extensively illustrated with archival material, Modern Architecture and Climate provides global perspectives on modern architecture and its evolving relationship with a changing climate, showcasing designs from Latin America, Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and Africa. This timely and important book reconciles the cultural dynamism of architecture with the material realities of ever-increasing carbon emissions from the mechanical cooling systems of buildings and offers a historical foundation for today’s zero-carbon design.
"Geometry in Architecture, a revised edition of Pioneer Texas Buildings, juxtaposes the historic structures with works by twenty contemporary architects who are inspired by the pioneer tradition to show how seamlessly the basic geometries translate from one era to another. As in the earlier book, sketches and brief commentary by Clovis Heimsath explain how squares, triangles, and circles take shape in the cylindrical forms that comprise houses and other buildings. Then black and white photographs, the heart of the book, illustrate these geometric forms in historic and modern buildings."--BOOK JACKET.