The details of modern architecture

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Patricia Johnston

During the 1920s and 1930s, Edward Steichen was the most successful photographer in the advertising industry. Although much has been said about his fine-art photography, his commercial work - which appeared regularly in Vanity Fair, Vogue, Ladies' Home Journal, and other popular magazines - has not received the attention it deserves. In this book, Patricia Johnston uses Steichen's work as a case study of advertising photography as it developed in the consumer culture between the wars. She traces the evolution of Steichen's work from an early naturalistic style through increasingly calculated attempts to construct consumer fantasies. Steichen's work convinced advertising agents that photography was a far more effective medium for engaging and persuading consumers than the more traditional drawn illustrations. Johnston presents an intriguing view of advertising agencies from the inside. Using agency archives, she reconstructs the teamwork of clients, art directors, account executives, copywriters, and photographers. And she goes on to assess how these widely distributed images work in American culture - how they interact with their audience to express, reflect, shape, and challenge social values.

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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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Patricia West

"Focusing on George Washington's Mount Vernon, Louisa May Alcott's Orchard House, Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, and the Booker T. Washington National Monument, Patricia West shows how historic houses reflect less the lives and times of their famous inhabitants than the political pressures of the eras during which they were transformed into museums. In the late 1850s, the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association evoked a mythologized George Washington to campaign for the "rescue" of his home, glossing over his role as a slaveholder to appeal to patrons on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. In 1912, the establishment of Orchard House as a museum paid homage to Alcott's novel Little Women and unified the Woman's Club of Concord, Massachusetts, which was bitterly divided over women's suffrage. In the 1920s and 1930s, Monticello became a touchstone for professional house restoration and an idealized Thomas Jefferson a focal point for a rift-weary Democratic Party. During the 1950s, the birthplace of Booker T. Washington became a monument created largely by politicians besieged by conflicts over civil rights." "In Domesticating History, West contends that house museum founders, while claiming to create sites strictly devoted to individual lives, were in fact establishing monuments steeped in the issues of their times."--BOOK JACKET.

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Eva Hagberg

Twenty-five recent residential projects from around the United States take the concept of "green living" to the next architectural level. Going beyond the simple use of sustainable materials, these houses are designed to frame a very particular vision of nature for their owners that brings them as close as possible to nature while remaining indoors. Featured are dynamic designs by today's most energetic architectural firms including ARO, Tod Williams/Billie Tsien, Diller Scofidio + Renfro as well as up-and-coming smaller firms. Houses vary in scale, complexity, and site to give a broad survey of the potential of this cutting-edge approach. Show More Show Less.