Conversations with Artists

Conversations with Artists

Author: Selden Rodman

Publisher:

Published: 1957

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Thirty five American painters, sculptors & architects discuss their work and one another with Selden Rodman.


Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier

Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier

Author: Richard A. Etlin

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9780719040610

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Architectural historian Etlin defines the main principles of progressive 19th-century architectural thought: the architectural system, the picturesque, philosophical eclecticism, and the spirit of the times. These principles are explored in detail in relation to 19th- and 20th-century architecture, and also to demonstrate their importance to the work of Wright and Le Corbusier. Illustrated with drawings and photos. Distributed by St. Martin's Press. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR


Lost Providence

Lost Providence

Author: David Brussat

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1467137243

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Dave Brussat has made a significant contribution to the history of Providence. For those interested in that history, Lost Providence is a real find. Providence Journal Providence has one of the nation's most intact historic downtowns and is one of America's most beautiful cities. The history of architectural change in the city is one of lost buildings, urban renewal plans and challenges to preservation. The Narragansett Hotel, a lost city icon, hosted many famous guests and was demolished in 1960. The American classical renaissance expressed itself in the Providence National Bank, tragically demolished in 2005. Urban renewal plans such as the Downtown Providence plan and the College Hill plan threatened the city in the mid-twentieth century. Providence eventually embraced its heritage through plans like the River Relocation Project that revitalized the city's waterfront and the Downcity Plan that revitalized its downtown. Author David Brussat chronicles the trials and triumphs of Providence's urban development.


Frank Lloyd Wright Versus America

Frank Lloyd Wright Versus America

Author: Donald Leslie Johnson

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 9780262600224

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

For his critics and biographers, the 1930s have always been the most challenging period of Frank Lloyd Wright's career. This account uses the architect's long-inaccessable archives at Taliesin West to provide a balanced evaluation of Wright in the 1930s. It separates Wright's design activities from his self-promotion and places his philosophy of individualism within the context of the times.


Makers of Modern Architecture

Makers of Modern Architecture

Author: Martin Filler

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2007-07-17

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9781590172278

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Everyone knows what modern architecture looks like, but few understand how this revolutionary new form of building emerged little more than a century ago or what its aesthetic, social, even spiritual aspirations were. Through illuminating studies of the leading men and women who forever changed our built environment, veteran architecture critic Martin Filler offers fresh insights into this unprecedented cultural transformation. From Louis Sullivan, father of the skyscraper, to Frank Gehry, magician of post-millennial museum, Filler emphasizes how their force of personality has had a decisive effect on everything from how we inhabit our homes to how we shape our cities. Why was the sudden shift in architectural fashion that wrecked the career of the Scottish designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh not enough to destroy the indomitable spirit of Frank Lloyd Wright, who rose from adversity to become America’s greatest architect? Why was Philip Johnson, “dean of American architecture” during the 1980s, so haunted by the superior talent of this less-fortunate contemporary Louis Kahn that he could barely utter his name even at the peak of his own success? How did Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s dictum “Less is more” give way to Robert Venturi’s “Less is a bore”? Surveying such current urban design sagas as the reconstruction of Ground Zero and the reunification of Berlin, Filler also trains his sharp eye on some of the biggest names in architecture today, puncturing more than one overinflated reputation while identifying the true masters who are now building for the ages.


Origins of Architectural Pleasure

Origins of Architectural Pleasure

Author: Grant Hildebrand

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1999-06-30

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 9780520215054

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This engaging study discusses ways in which architectural forms emulate some archetypal settings that humans have found appealing--and useful for survival--from ancient times to the present. 119 photos. 6 line figures.


Architecture's Odd Couple

Architecture's Odd Couple

Author: Hugh Howard

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2016-05-24

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1620403765

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In architectural terms, the twentieth century can be largely summed up with two names: Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson. Wright (1867–1959) began it with his romantic prairie style; Johnson (1906–2005) brought down the curtain with his spare postmodernist experiments. Between them, they built some of the most admired and discussed buildings in American history. Differing radically in their views on architecture, Wright and Johnson shared a restless creativity, enormous charisma, and an outspokenness that made each man irresistible to the media. Often publicly at odds, they were the twentieth century's flint and steel; their repeated encounters consistently set off sparks. Yet as acclaimed historian Hugh Howard shows, their rivalry was also a fruitful artistic conversation, one that yielded new directions for both men. It was not despite but rather because of their contentious--and not always admiring--relationship that they were able so powerfully to influence history. In Architecture's Odd Couple, Howard deftly traces the historical threads connecting the two men and offers readers a distinct perspective on the era they so enlivened with their designs. Featuring many of the structures that defined modern space--from Fallingwater to the Guggenheim, from the Glass House to the Seagram Building--this book presents an arresting portrait of modern architecture's odd couple and how they shaped the American landscape by shaping each other.


Lutyens and the Modern Movement

Lutyens and the Modern Movement

Author: Allan Greenberg

Publisher: Papadakis Dist A/C

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the exclusionary world of high modern architecture, it is curious to discover that two icons of the movement both admired the work of Sir Edwin Lutyens - an architect who had little or no interest in modernism. Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright created buildings that are very different, and the two men did not even like each other, but they shared a fascination for Lutyens' distinctively non-international style architecture. This polemical text is an account of why this occured. By exposing common aesthetic and structural themes in the architecture of these three giants, including the cities of New Delhi and Chandigahr, in India, the author explains why Wright and Le Corbusier may have had more in common with Lutyens than with many of their modern peers. The primary text in the book was written in 1967 and was published in a student journal in the U.S. with a small circulation. It has remained an underground classic since then - perhaps because its contents are so disruptive of our current views of 20th century modernism.


Voiture Minimum

Voiture Minimum

Author: Antonio Amado

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2011-02-11

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 0262015366

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A colorful account of Le Corbusier's love affair with the automobile, his vision of the ideal vehicle, and his tireless promotion of a design that industry never embraced. Le Corbusier, who famously called a house “a machine for living,” was fascinated—even obsessed—by another kind of machine, the automobile. His writings were strewn with references to autos: “If houses were built industrially, mass-produced like chassis, an aesthetic would be formed with surprising precision,” he wrote in Toward an Architecture (1923). In his “white phase” of the twenties and thirties, he insisted that his buildings photographed with a modern automobile in the foreground. Le Corbusier moved beyond the theoretical in 1936, entering (with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret) an automobile design competition, submitting plans for “a minimalist vehicle for maximum functionality,” the Voiture Minimum. Despite Le Corbusier's energetic promotion of his design to several important automakers, the Voiture Minimum was never mass-produced. This book is the first to tell the full and true story of Le Corbusier's adventure in automobile design. Architect Antonio Amado describes the project in detail, linking it to Le Corbusier's architectural work, to Modernist utopian urban visions, and to the automobile design projects of other architects including Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright. He provides abundant images, including many pages of Le Corbusier's sketches and plans for the Voiture Minimum, and reprints Le Corbusier's letters seeking a manufacturer. Le Corbusier's design is often said to have been the inspiration for Volkswagen's enduringly popular Beetle; the architect himself implied as much, claiming that his design for the 1936 competition originated in 1928, before the Beetle. Amado Lorenzo, after extensive examination of archival and source materials, disproves this; the influence may have gone the other way. Although many critics considered the Voiture Minimum a footnote in Le Corbusier's career, Le Corbusier did not. This book, lavishly illustrated and exhaustively documented, restores Le Corbusier's automobile to the main text.