"This book establishes R.M. Schindler’s Kings Road House amongst the icons of modernist housing—as crucial as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, or Frank Lloyd Wright to the story of twentieth-century residential design. Weaving together an impressive blend of primary sources, Sweeney and Sheine illuminate heretofore unknown or neglected stories regarding Schindler’s life, his relationship with his mentors—most notably, Wright himself—and the development of his unique theories about space. These essays will interest both scholars and practitioners of architecture as well as readers wishing to learn more about the development of architectural modernism in general.”—J. Philip Gruen, School of Design and Construction, Washington State University.
The most comprehensive volume on one of the most innovative architects of the 20th-century. Contains many never-published drawings & photographs. -- Tie-in with Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Schoenberg is often viewed as an isolated composer who was ill-at-ease in exile. In this book Kenneth H. Marcus shows that in fact Schoenberg's connections to Hollywood ran deep, and most of the composer's exile compositions had some connection to the cultural and intellectual environment in which he found himself. He was friends with numerous successful film industry figures, including George Gershwin, Oscar Levant, David Raksin and Alfred Newman, and each contributed to the composer's life and work in different ways: helping him to obtain students, making recordings of his music, and arranging commissions. While teaching at both the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles, Schoenberg was able to bridge two utterly different worlds: the film industry and the academy. Marcus shows that alongside Schoenberg's vital impact upon Southern California Modernism through his pedagogy, compositions and texts, he also taught students who became central to American musical modernism, including John Cage and Lou Harrison.
"The Age of the Masters was the age of an architectural revolution that lasted over fifty years - from Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Glasgow Art School at the beginning of the century to Mies van der Rohe's National Gallery in Berlin at the end of the sixties. While they lived, the Masters comprised some of the most powerful architectural talents the Western world has yet produced, and at least two men of towering genius - Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. Their aspirations for the future of men, cities, and society may have been thwarted, but the prototypes they created still reflect the light of their creative fervor..." --
A revealing new look at modernist architecture, emphasizing its diversity, complexity, and broad inventiveness Usually associated with Mies and Le Corbusier, the Modern Movement was instrumental in advancing new technologies of construction in architecture, including the use of glass, steel, and reinforced concrete. Renowned historian Kenneth Frampton offers a bold look at this crucial period, focusing on architects less commonly associated with the movement in order to reveal the breadth and complexity of architectural modernism. The Other Modern Movement profiles nineteen architects, each of whom consciously contributed to the evolution of a new architectural typology through a key work realized between 1922 and 1962. Frampton's account offers new insights into iconic buildings like Eileen Gray's E-1027 House in France and Richard Neutra's Kaufmann House in Palm Springs, California, as well as lesser-known works such as Antonin Raymond's Tokyo Golf Club and Alejandro de la Sota's Maravillas School Gymnasium in Madrid. Foregrounding the ways that these diverse projects employed progressive models, advanced new methods in construction techniques, and displayed a new sociocultural awareness, Frampton shines a light on the rich legacy of the Modern Movement and the enduring potential of the unfinished modernist project.
The Walker House, RM Schindler is the first in a series of architecture books related to inspirational houses. It takes us to Los Angeles, the adopted home of Austrian-born American architect, RM Schindler, and tells the story of the Walker House and how it came into the possession of its current owner, journalist and modernist architecture and design geek, Andrew Romano. The 80-page hardbound book features interior photography by longtime Apartamento contributor, Ye Rin Mok, texts by Andrew Romano, and archival imagery of the Walker House, courtesy of the private collection of Andrew Romano and the University of Santa Barbara California.
Scholar and historian Christopher Long turns his attention to the little-known German-born architect and designer Jock Peters (1889-1934). This engaging study examines the architect's early development in Germany-Peters's work in Hamburg before World War I and in Berlin after the war-and the influences that shaped his thinking. Professor Long then places Peters's more mature work-created after he immigrated to America in 1922-within the context of the early history of Los Angeles modernism in the 1920s and early 1930s. Of Peters's modern work produced in America, most notable are the interiors he designed for the once-famous Hollander department store in New York City as well as those for Bullock's Wilshire in Los Angeles (the building was recently restored by Southwestern Law School). Both projects brought him international recognition. Peters also designed a dynamic sales office building for the short-lived Maddox Airlines, as well as stores and houses for the developer William Lingenbrink, a major supporter of the burgeoning modernism in Southern California. Aside from his architectural work, Peters designed film sets for Famous Lasky-Players (later Paramount Pictures), working in the famed art department of Hans Dreier. Despite his early death, Peters managed to leave his mark on the modernist landscape in Southern California at a time when the new style was just emerging.The 262 historic photographs, etchings, watercolors, drawings (including floor plans), many in color, create a visually rich study of Peters's work, including his designs for houses, retail spaces, storefronts, furniture, packaging, textiles, and film sets. Much of the material is from the architect's personal archive, still in family hands, and has never before been published.
How do we create the new from the old? The Architecture of Influence explores this fundamental question by analyzing a broad swath of twentieth-century architectural works—including some of the best-known examples of the architectural canon, modern and postmodern—through the lens of influence. The book serves as both a critique of the discipline’s long-standing focus on "genius" and a celebration of the creative act of revisioning and reimagining the past. It argues that all works of architecture not only depend on the past but necessarily alter, rewrite, and reposition the traditions and ideas to which they refer. Organized into seven chapters—Replicas, Copies, Compilations, Generalizations, Revivals, Emulations, and Self-Repetitions—the book redefines influence as an active process through which the past is defined, recalled, and subsequently redefined within twentieth-century architecture.
Maverick of mid-century American architecture "Each of my buildings deal with a different architectural problem, the existence of which has been forgotten in this period of Rational Mechanization. The question of whether a house is really a house is more important to me, than the fact that it is made of steel, glass, putty or hot air." - R. M. Schindler Hailing from Vienna, Rudolph Michael Schindler (1887-1953), like his colleague Richard Neutra, emigrated to the US and applied his International Style techniques to the movement that would come to be known as California Modernism. Influenced by the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and taking cues from spatial notions found in cubism, he developed a singular style characterized by geometrical shapes, bold lines, and association of materials such as wood and concrete, as seen in his own Hollywood home (built in 1921-22) and the house he designed for P.M. Lovell in Newport Beach (1923-24). About the Series: Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Architecture Series features: an introduction to the life and work of the architect the major works in chronological order information about the clients, architectural preconditions as well as construction problems and resolutions a list of all the selected works and a map indicating the locations of the best and most famous buildings approximately 120 illustrations (photographs, sketches, drafts and plans)
