Hearst Castle

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Jessica Kerwin Jenkins

"All the Time in the World proffers a miscellany of customs, traditions, and pleasures people have pursued throughout the ages. An antidote to the contemporary cult of Getting Things Done, the book takes its cue from the medieval books of hours, which prescribed certain readings and contemplations for various parts of the day and year. Full of witty bon mots, interesting etymologies, and arresting anecdotes, the book encompasses an array of cultures and eras including ancient Greece, Renaissance Florence, 1930s Shanghai, and the Hollywood Hills of the late 1960s, drifting through the worlds of fashion, beauty, art, food, or travel. Focusing on the glamorous, eccentric, unusual and sublime, subjects covered include: the daylong ceremony of laying a royal Elizabethan tablecloth; the radicalization of sartorial chic in 1890s Paris; Nostradamus' belief in the aphrodisiac power of jam (and the book of recipes he published the same year as his predictions); the sensuous practice of sniffing incense in 15th century Japan; the American fascination with flaming desserts; the short-lived artistic discipline of "lumia," or visual music; the Ottoman Empire's 17th century ban on coffee; the magnetic atmosphere that fueled Parisian highlife in the 1920s; Henriette d'Angeville's fearless ascent of Mont Blanc, armed with 13 guides, 24 roast chickens, and 18 bottles of wine; the elaborate treasure hunts concocted by London's Bright Young Things; and the musical revolution known as bebop. Entertaining, unexpected, and charming, All the Time in the World digs up the forgotten treasures of the past and inspires a passion for good living in the present"--

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Victor Margolin

Following World War I, a new artistic-social avant-garde emerged with the ambition to engage the artist in the building of social life. Nowhere is this project more evident than in the lives of Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy whose careers covered a broad range of artistic practices and political situations. The remarkable continuity between the various forms of their work stems from their belief that art had to be extended beyond the aesthetic sphere. But given that the social situations they confronted changed radically in their lifetimes, their operative strategies were severely tested and underwent significant revisions. Through close readings of their work as it relates to the situations in which they were active, Victor Margolin examines the way these three artists negotiated the changing relations between their social ideals and the political realities they confronted. He follows them and their affiliations through the 1920s and 1930s in Moscow, Berlin, and Chicago, documenting their contributions to utopian architecture, Constructivist ideology, industrial design, photography, visual communication, and design education. Each essay features one or two of the artist-designers and shifts from one medium to another through a chronological narrative that begins with the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and ends in Chicago just after World War II. Focusing on the difficult relationship between art and social change, Margolin brings important new insights to our understanding of the avant-garde's role in a period of great political complexity.

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Wolfgang Wagener

"Raphael Soriano (1904-1988) was one of the early Case Study architects working in California in the mid-twentieth century, and a talented advocate of the new building materials and construction techniques developed just before and after World War II. Born in Rhodes, Soriano arrived in Los Angeles in 1924 at the age of 20. After graduating from the University of Southern California, he worked in the offices of Rudolph Schindler, Richard Neutra, and for Los Angeles County before starting his own practice in Los Angeles in 1935. His characteristic floating roofs, tranparent exterior walls, and open plan responded to the postwar demand for family-friendly, middle-class housing and an indoor-outdoor lifestyle well suited to the Southern California climate. In 1953, Soriano relocated to Tiburon, near San Francisco, where he designed housing for the maverick developer Joseph Eichler, as well as innovative aluminum structures." "Independent-minded and often irascible, Soriano's architectural contribution has been largely overlooked to date. Though he designed 150 buildings and built more than 50 during his career, only a dozen projects remain standing. This book is the first published monograph on Soriano, with a thoroughly researched account of the architect's life and oeuvre, and an essay on the historical and cultural factors influencing the development of postwar housing in Southern California. It includes an examination of 30 key Soriano buildings and a listing of Complete Works that documents, for the first time, every known project in Soriano's archive, with bibliographic references. In addition to previously unpublished original plans and drawings, this volume features approximately 125 photographs by renowned architectural photographer Julius Shulman, who was a close friend of Soriano and documented his work over a period of 40 years."--BOOK JACKET.

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Martial Rose and Julia Hedgecoe

The magnificent roof bosses of Norwich Cathedral are one of the great hidden glories of medieval art. There are more than one thousand of these delightfully carved and painted keystones in the high stone vaulting, dating from 1300 to 1515 and measuring between eight and twenty-four inches wide. The vast majority are figure carvings uniquely linked together in storytelling patterns, reflecting a variety of pagan, Christian, and folk subjects. Situated some eighty feet up from the floor of the cathedral, these ornaments are too distant to have been fully appreciated by worshippers over the centuries; by the same token, their inaccessibility has protected them from vandalism. This book reproduces the most striking and interesting examples, selected from the hundreds of exquisite color photographs taken by the distinguished photographer Julia Hedgecoe, under the auspices of the cathedral. They are introduced and fully described in a lively text by one of Norwich's foremost medieval historians, Martial Rose.