Raphael Soriano

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David Underwood

Oscar Niemeyer, born in 1907, is widely considered this century's leading Latin American architect, as well as one of the pioneers of modern architecture. This volume explores the major themes and sources of the most important works from all phases of Niemeyer's career, from the early collaborations of the 1930s and 1940s with Lucio Costa, the spiritual father of Brazilian modernism, to the 1989 Memorial da America Latina in Sao Paulo, a complex that reveals the maturation of Niemeyer's free-form style in the service of his utopian vision. A central theme of Niemeyer's work has been its reflection of the Brazilian jeito, a sinuous and improvisational style manifested in everything from the country's sensual, undulating landscape to its attraction to spontaneous impulses, best known through its vibrant music and dance. The jeito and the milieu of Rio de Janeiro lie at the heart of Niemeyer's free-form style, which emphasizes the inherent plasticity of the native curve over the rigid rectilinearity of the International Style in Europe. A second theme treats the influence on Niemeyer of the poetic style of Le Corbusier. Also considered are Niemeyer's attraction to surrealist biomorphic forms and his desire to express a sense of the fantastic in architecture. A final theme is Niemeyer's search for an aesthetic utopia that would resolve social dilemmas by wishing them away through architecture. Herein lies Niemeyer's strength, for as his architecture reflects the multiple dichotomies of the Brazilian experience, it projects an emotive universality that few architects have been able to achieve.

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Peter Kilby

"Southampton through the ages is an innovative book providing a historic account of the City of Southampton from its inception in 43AD through until the present day. The author's inclusion of extensive descriptions of the buildings and their origins supported by many exceptional photographs and illustrations, paints a vivid portrayal of the city's architectural prowess from first construction to current condition. This book addresses the evolution of Southampton from its beginnings as a Roman settlement in the 1st century AD, through its encounters as a trading settlement, and onto its development as an important link between England and Normandy, until hostilities broke out between the two countries. Periods of wealth as Southampton became a port of considerable stature are recounted, as are times of economic decline up until the city's fortunes changed once again with the discovery of a spa water supply in 1750. The book tells of how modern Southampton dates from the opening of the railway line connecting London to the docks, how it has recently established itself as a premier passenger port, and how World War II has greatly influenced the appearance of the city as we know it today."--BOOK JACKET.

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Witold Rybczynski

"Before Andrea Palladio began designing his simple, gracious, perfectly proportioned villas, architectural genius was reserved for temples and palaces. Palladio elevated the architecture of the private house into an art form, and he not only designed and built, he wrote. His late-sixteenth-century architectural treatises were read and studied by great thinkers as diverse as Thomas Jefferson and Inigo Jones, profoundly influencing the design of Monticello, the tidewater plantation houses of Virginia, and the White House. All across America today, Palladio's influence is evident in ample porches and columned porticoes, in grand ceiling heights and front-door pediments.". "In The Perfect House, Witold Rybczynski, whose books on domestic and landscape architecture have transformed our understanding of parks and buildings, looks at Palladio's famous villas, not with the eye of an art historian but with the eye of an architect. He wanted to know why a handful of houses in an obscure corner of the Venetian Republic should have made their presence felt hundreds of years later and halfway across the globe."--BOOK JACKET.

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Pamela A. Webb

Sculpted figural motifs were an important component of many buildings in the Hellenistic world, and their frequent relegation to subsidiary status has, until now, left our knowledge of both Hellenistic architecture and sculpture incomplete. In Hellenistic Architectural Sculpture, Pamela A. Webb examines the full range of figural embellishmentfrom simple to complex, on large monuments as well as on more obscure ones, and in the major population centers as well as the smaller cities, sanctuaries, and isolated areas throughout western Anatolia and the Aegean islands. In this book, the first to focus specifically on the figural adornment of Hellenistic architecture, Webb provides extensive information about the chronology and interpretation of figural motifs adorning religious, civic, commercial, commemorative, and domestic constructions. She finds that figural sculptures adorn structures at every level from the ground to the roof, and display a wide variety of motifs on such architectural elements as columns, walls, entablatures, and pediments. More than 130 illustrations of Hellenistic monumentstemples, altars, cult buildings, heroa, theaters, bouleuteria, stoas, gymnasia, and housesand their sculptured adornment complement the authors descriptions and analyses. The book features an extensive bibliography, citing resources from the early nineteenth century to the most recent publications. Reading the book was pure pleasure. Webb brings together an extraordinary amount of material, ranging from the extremely familiar to the very obscure, and puts it in overall perspective both as sculpture and as architectural elements. I am certain that specialists in both fields will find it useful and enlightening, and also that it will be accessible and enjoyable for non-specialists and readers with little background in Greek artincluding undergraduates.Steven Lattimore, University of California, Los Angeles Webbs grasp of the scholarship and coverage of the monuments seem all but total, and her careful and jucicious critiques of previous opinion are most valuable.Andrew F. Stewart, University of California, Berkeley