architecture criticism

Softcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press, reprint, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 271 pages, paperback. Cultural criticism regarding the Weimar Republic. With many color and black-and-white illustrations throughout. Unmarked. Bright and clean; a tight copy. Examines intellectual life in the Weimar Republic, looks at paintings, caricatures, dance, architecture, and films, and discusses the Nazi rise to power.

Hardcover. New York, Museum of Art New York, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 320 pages. Hardcover. Dust jacket unclipped. Color and b/w illustrations throughout. In excellent condition, clean inside and out.

Hardcover. Chicago, University Of Chicago Press, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 397 pages, illustrated throughout in b&w. Slight crease to dust jacket front flap, slight dent to rear cover upper corner, else a clean, unmarked copy in excellent condition.

Hardcover. New York, Rizzoli, 1st Edition, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 312 pages. Hardcover. Color illustrations throughout including interiors and exteriors of projects, as well as blue prints. Red endpapers. Cover boards bound in charcoal cloth, gilt title on spine, all excellent. Dust jacket unclipped, very good. Pages clean and unmarked. Top edge has some light soil. Binding tight, spine straight. In beautiful condition. This extraordinary book presents thirty-eight of the most renowned and significant buildings of America's premier architect, from his early Prairie work in Oak Park, IL, in the 1890's to his daring creations of the 1940's and 1950's.

Hardcover. Portland, OR, Nazraeli Press, 1st, 2010, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 108 pages. This printing limited to 1000 copies. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Creasing to a few pages. An otherwise clean, unmarked copy with only minor edgewear. In the mid-1980s, Stu Levy began making 'grid-portraits' in order to overcome his his frustration with traditional portraiture's limited point of view. These constructs of photographs, consisting of twelve to twenty-five individual images, scan the architecture and flow of time in a subject's living or working environment. The resulting portraits, usually of artists, craftspeople and musicians, are made in the subjects' studios or living spaces and serve as a backstage tour of the artist s mind and creative process. Levy is fascinated by the artifacts that fill these spaces the possessions by which the subjects are themselves possessed. Rather than confining himself to a single 'decisive' moment, Levy explore its antithesis, a maze of scrambled time. These are made with a view camera using 4 x 5-inch negatives to allow for precision of detail. The sections are printed together to form the illusion of glancing through a window at a 'snapshot' of an event, which in reality might consist of fragmentary views made months apart and in totally separate rooms or environments. Among the subjects included in this important new monograph are Dr. Stanley Burns, Linda Connor, Barbara Crane, Jay Dusard, David Hockney, Graham Nash, and Jerry Uelsmann. Beautifully printed in duotone on matt art paper and bound in black Japanese cloth, this first printing of Grid-Portraits is limited to 1,000 copies.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1st, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 420 pages, illustrated with mostly b&w plates, 8 color pages. Small remainder stamp on bottom edge. "Tiege was at one and the same time both an agent provocateur and seismograph, at once provoking action and debate and yet simultaneously reacting with the utmost sensitivity to the shifting political spectrum of his time."--from the introduction by Kenneth FramptonKarel Teige (1900-1951), a leading figure of the avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s, participated in every important argument and controversy of those turbulent years. He edited the most influential avant-garde journals on Czech and international cultural affairs and wrote profoundly original essays and books on the theory and criticism of art and architecture. He also produced paintings, collages, photomontages, film scripts, book covers, and typefaces and participated in theatrical performances.

Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 200 pages. The City of Refuge complex--commissioned by the Salvation Army as part of its program to transform social outcasts into spiritually renewed workers--represents a significant confluence of design principles, technological experiments, and attitudes on reform. It also provides rare insights into the work of one of the twentieth century's greatest architects, Le Corbusier. Brian Brace Taylor draws on extensive archival research to reconstruct each step of the architect's attraction to the commission, his design process and technological innovations, the social and philosophical compatibility of the Salvation Army with Le Corbusier's own ideas for urban planning, and finally, the many modifications required, first to eliminate defects and later to accommodate changes in the services the building provided. Throughout, Taylor focuses on Le Corbusier's environmental, technological, and social intentions as opposed to his strictly formal intentions. He shows that the City of Refuge became primarily a laboratory for the architect's own research and not simply a conventional solution to residents' requirements or the Salvation Army's program.

Softcover. Allworth Press, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 224 pages. Ranging from earthworks to conceptual art, this illuminating read offers an integrated view of all the significant artistic developments of one crucial decade, the extraordinary explosion that occurred between 1965 and 1975. The author, a leading art critic, focuses a new lens on this radical movement, showing the nuances that defined Minimalism in its various phases, as characterized by the inflected object, the disintegrated object, the ironic object -then the transition from the object to architecture, space, landscape, cityscape, body, performance, and conceptual art. No other account has documented in such detail the scope and impact of this artistic revolution, which the author argues spanned all mediums and pushed every aesthetic possibility of Minimalism to an extreme.

Hardcover. NY, The Monacelli Press, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 208 pages. Debate and banter between the irascible Philip Johnson and the equally articulate and opinionated Robert A. M. Stern generates a provocative combination of astute commentary and personal observation on the state of architecture in the twentieth century. Philip Johnson's multifaceted career as an architect, curator, and collector extended from the early 1920s to his death in 2005. Captivated by the work of the European modernists Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe, Johnson assembled the seminal exhibition "Modern Architecture--International Exhibition" at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932. Among his most notable achievements are the famous Glass House in Connecticut, designed for his own use, and the Seagram Building in New York, in association with Mies van der Rohe.Recognized as the dean of American architecture, Johnson had a profound influence on the next generation of architects, including Robert A. M. Stern. Stern has conducted a series of ten interviews with Johnson, each covering a decade of his life, that provide an illuminating assessment of a significant period of American architecture. No dj issued.

Softcover. London, Afterall Books, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 88 pages. Illustrated with b&w and color plates. Kitchen Corner, Tenant Farmhouse, Hale County, Alabama shows a painstakingly clean-swept corner in the house of an Alabama sharecropper. Taken in 1936 by Walker Evans as part of his work for the Farm Security Administration, Kitchen Corner was not published until 1960, when it was included in a new edition of Walker Evans and James Agee's classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The 1960 reissue of Evans and Agee's book had an enormous impact on Americans' perceptions of the Depression, creating a memory-image retrospectively through Walker's iconic photographs and Agee's text. In this latest addition to the Afterall One Work series, photographer Olivier Richon examines Kitchen Corner. The photograph is particularly significant, he argues, because it uses a documentary form that privileges detachment, calling attention to overlooked objects and to the architecture of the dispossessed.

Softcover. London, Afterall Books, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 88 pages. Illustrated with b&w and color plates. Kitchen Corner, Tenant Farmhouse, Hale County, Alabama shows a painstakingly clean-swept corner in the house of an Alabama sharecropper. Taken in 1936 by Walker Evans as part of his work for the Farm Security Administration, Kitchen Corner was not published until 1960, when it was included in a new edition of Walker Evans and James Agee's classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The 1960 reissue of Evans and Agee's book had an enormous impact on Americans' perceptions of the Depression, creating a memory-image retrospectively through Walker's iconic photographs and Agee's text. In this latest addition to the Afterall One Work series, photographer Olivier Richon examines Kitchen Corner. The photograph is particularly significant, he argues, because it uses a documentary form that privileges detachment, calling attention to overlooked objects and to the architecture of the dispossessed.

Hardcover. Zurich, Scheidegger and Spiess, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in pictorial cloth, 210 pages, 164 color and 76 b/w illustrations. Le Corbusier (1887-1965) is one the most influential architects of the twentieth century. In the Scandinavian countries, his influence is arguably most pronounced in the writings and art of the Danish experimentalist Asger Jorn (1914-1973). Their collaboration on Le Corbusier's pavilion for the 1937 Paris World Exhibition sparked Jorn's lifelong fascination with the great architect and with architecture more broadly as an inherently public form of art. At the same time, Le Corbusier started working in the visual arts and began to move from a rational, technological approach to architecture towards a more poetic, materialist approach. Published in collaboration with the Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, What Moves Us? focuses specifically on the reception of Le Corbusier in Scandinavia, with the relationship between Jorn and Le Corbusier as a thematic thread. The book first highlights the architect's change of direction and subsequently takes readers through his influence on the young artist. The book's distinguished contributors explore the relationships that emerged among their artistic theories and practices, including Jorn's later critique of Le Corbusier. Essays also explore the wider influence of Le Corbusier on Scandinavian architecture and urbanization and consider Le Corbusier alongside the Danish architect Jorn Oberg Utzon and the Aarhus Brutalism movement.

Hardcover. NY, Reynal and Hitchcock, 1st, 1947, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Poor, Hardcover in a tattered and chipped dust jacket. Off-white cloth with black spine title. 217 pages, b&w drawings by the author. Translated from the French, Quand les Cathedrales Etaient Blanches, by Francis E. Hyslop, Jr. Dj is poor with tape repair to the reverse side. Book has a small stamp to the front fly leaf, otherwise clean.