This first monograph on Schindler House features specially commissioned color images of the twentieth-century architectural masterpiece. Tie-in with Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
"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..." --
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.
Two Austrian-born designers have left their indelible mark on California?s residential architecture of the 1930s to 1960s: Richard Neutra (1892?1970) and Rudolph M. Schindler (1887?1953) combined modern form and inventive construction with new materials to create a truly modern vision of living that remains inspirational to the present day.00This new book features twenty famous and lesser known houses from that period, designed by the two pioneers and other architects that were influenced by Neutra?s and Schindler?s ideas. All are marked by highly economical use and outstanding quality of space, a minimalist aesthetic, and by their ideal adaption to climatic conditions. They are monuments of a period as well as timeless models for contemporary and future architecture.00The images by photographer David Schreyer show the buildings in their present state as a commodity of highest quality that can be, and should be, altered to meet today?s changed demands to a living space. Andreas Nierhaus?s texts, based on interviews, explore the relationship of the present inhabitants to their homes and what they mean to them. Together, the authors offer uniquely intimate insights into a sophisticated way of life still too little known outside California.
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)
This fall, East of Borneo will publish the first anthology of Esther McCoy’s landmark writing about Southern California. Esther McCoy (1904-1989) was a keen literary stylist and an ingenious architectural historian who chronicled mid-century modernist design as it was being created. Her 1960 book Five California Architects has long been acknowledged as an indispensable classic. As Reyner Banham observed: “No one can write about architecture in California without acknowledging her as the mother of us all." Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader (Fall 2011), edited and with an introduction by Susan Morgan, presents an unprecedented selection of McCoy’s work—innovative articles, out-of-print essays, unpublished lectures, and personal memoir—and roundly recognizes this brilliant American original, the pre-eminent voice of West Coast modernism.
"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 five architects - Bernard Maybeck, Irving Gill, the brothers Charles and Henry Greene, and R.M. Schindler - whose work and lives are presented here were seminal figures in American architecture. As Californians they were less influenced than their Eastern contemporaries by the European styles that prevailed in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, and each of them devised an original style that has had a profound effect on younger generations of American architects."--The inside cover