Lewis Mumford and American Modernism

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Marc Treib

Published in conjunction with a major exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, An Everyday Modernism: The Houses of William Wurster is the first large-scale examination of Wurster's fifty-year career and his important place in contemporary American architectural thought. Featured here are photographs, drawings, and plans of over fifty of Wurster's projects, as well as many others by his contemporaries. Essays by distinguished architectural historians and critics provide insight into both his professional and personal life while also exploring the complex interplay of social and political forces that affected housing during the first half of this century.

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[coordination éditoriale, Laura Maggioni

Maître de la chair, Auguste Rodin ne cessera de valoriser la figure humaine au point d'en faire l'épine dorsale de sa création. Donnant libre cours à son instinct et à son intuition, il persiste dans l'épopée de la forme et son art tout entier est une leçon de modernité. Propice aux découvertes et aux réflexions nouvelles, sa production artistique prolifique, protéiforme et exploratoire demeure unique. Cet ouvrage met en valeur un artiste éminemment libre et affranchi, et offre une série de figures et de morceaux accidentés, heurtés ou mutilés, trame de toutes les audaces formelles du créateur et reflet de l'émotion du sculpteur.

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Robin Middleton and David Watkin

This volume offers a complete survey of European architecture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, examining in particular the influence of the cultural trends of the period on the architects' works. The first section of the book deals with the history of eighteenth-century architecture in France and England, countries where Cartesian-school philosophical speculation and Anglo-Saxon philosophical empiricism wielded a determining influence. After analyzing the developments of the classical tradition and its propagation throughout Europe, the book studies in depth the history of architectural movements, comprising neo-classicism, neo-Renaissance and neo-Gothic architecture. The outstanding, fore-running personalities of this brilliant artistic period who, in the course of the nineteenth century, offered fecund theoretic and stylistic contributions, include Gottfried Semper, John Ruskin and Eugene Viollet-le Duc.

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Alina Payne

"In the late 19th century, a centuries-old preference for highly ornamented architecture gave way to a budding Modernism of clean lines and unadorned surfaces. At the same moment, everyday objects--cups, saucers, chairs, and tables--began to receive critical attention.Alina Payne addresses this shift, arguing for a new understanding of the genealogy of architectural modernism: rather than the well-known story in which an absorption of technology and mass production created a radical aesthetic that broke decisively with the past, Payne argues for a more gradual shift, as the eloquence of architectural ornamentation was taken on by objects of daily use. As she demonstrates, the work of Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier should be seen as the culmination of a conversation about ornament dating as far back as the Renaissance. Payne looks beyond the usual suspects of philosophy and science to establish theoretical catalysts for the shift from ornament to object in the varied fields of anthropology and ethnology; art history and the museum; and archaeology and psychology"--