Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Architecture


Book Description

For more information including the introduction, a full list of entries and contributors, a generous selection of sample pages and more, visit the Encyclope dia of 20th Century Architecture website. Focusing on architecture from all regions of the world, this three-volume set profiles the twentieth century's vast chronicle of architectural achievements, both within and well beyond the theoretical confines of modernism. Unlike existing works, this encyclopedia examines the complexities of rapidly changing global conditions that have dispersed modern architectural types, movements, styles, and building practices across traditional geographic and cultural boundaries.




Paul T. Frankl and Modern American Design


Book Description

A comprehensive view of the life, work, and ideas of one of the creative giants of modern American design Arriving in the United States in 1914, Viennese-born Paul T. Frankl (1886-1958) brought with him an outsider's fresh perspective and an enthusiasm for forging a uniquely American design aesthetic. In the years between the two world wars he, more than any other designer, helped shape the distinctive look of American modernism. This authoritative book draws on an extensive collection of unpublished documents and family papers and photographs to provide the first full account of Frankl's life and ideas. The book also explores the history of modern American design and the extent of Frankl's influence on its trajectory. In the early 1920s, Frankl opened a New York City shop that became an epicenter of American modernism. Over the next decades, his work encompassed everything from individual pieces of furniture and decorative accessories to entire interiors, and his style continuously evolved, from early "Skyscraper" furniture to relaxed and casual designs favored by the Hollywood elite in the 1930s to manufactured pieces for the mass market in the 1950s. The book charts the impact of Frankl's ideas on merchants and consumers, on his fellow designers, and on the changing look of American homes and workplaces. With close to 170 illustrations, Paul T. Frankl and Modern American Design is an essential reference on 20th-century design.




German Art 1907-1937


Book Description

This book examines the responses of visual artists, including architects, designers and photographers, to the technological and social modernisation of Germany during the first three decades of the twentieth century. It investigates how these aspects of the modernising process inform both the subject matter and formal innovations of their work. The study analyses how these visual practices were not just the concerns of isolated and enclosed art worlds but had wider social resonances, ranging from the debates concerning the reformist objectives of the Deutscher Werkbund (1907) to the National Socialist ideological onslaught on modernist culture culminating in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibitions of 1937. Many of the artists encountered here were radicalised by the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the November 1918 Revolution in Germany, experiences which effected change in their conceptualising of cultural production and its social function: their modes of working, however, would also set challenging markers for what forms art might take for the twentieth century. The book is, therefore, both a study of art in complex political and sociocultural contexts and a reflection on how engagement with a social imagination can challenge a tradition based on the assumptions of individual imaginings.




Designing Modern Germany


Book Description

German design and architecture reflects the country’s rich and fraught political history in its structure and aesthetic philosophy. Jeremy Aynsley now offers an in-depth study of this relationship between German history and design since 1870 and the complex principles underlying it. Designing Modern Germany reveals how German attitudes toward national identity, modernity and technology are crucial to understanding German design. Aynsley traces the historical development of German design, beginning in the 1870s with the first dedicated Arts and Crafts schools and stretching through to the famous institutions of the Bauhaus and the Ulm Hochschule für Gestaltung. He analyses the works of leading figures such as Peter Behrens and Hannes Meyer, through to Ingo Maurer and Jil Sander, and many others in design specialties including graphics, industrial and furniture design, fashion and architecture. He also offers the first consideration of the contrasting design traditions of East and West Germany between 1949 and 1989. Whether examining the pre-First World War department store, the National Socialist fashion system or East Germany’s official design culture, Designing Modern Germany reveals that German design significantly affected citizens’ daily lives. An essential read for designers and scholars of German design and history, Designing Modern Germany is a key text for understanding Germany’s major contribution to twentieth-century design.




Debating German Cultural Identity Since 1989


Book Description

Interdisciplinary views of the debates over and transformation of German cultural identity since unification. The events of 1989 and German unification were seismic historical moments. Although 1989 appeared to signify a healing of the war-torn history of the twentieth century, unification posed the question of German cultural identity afresh. Politicians, historians, writers, filmmakers, architects, and the wider public engaged in "memory contests" over such questions as the legitimacy of alternative biographies, West German hegemony, and the normalization of German history. This dynamic, contested, and still ongoing transformation of German cultural identity is the topic of this volume of new essays by scholars from the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States, and Ireland. It exploresGerman cultural identity by way of a range of disciplines including history, film studies, architectural history, literary criticism, memory studies, and anthropology, avoiding a homogenized interpretation. Charting the complex and often contradictory processes of cultural identity formation, the volume reveals the varied responses that continue to accompany the project of unification. Contributors: Pertti Ahonen, Aleida Assmann, Elizabeth Boa, Peter Fritzsche, Anne Fuchs, Deniz Göktürk, Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Anja K. Johannsen, Jennifer A. Jordan, Jürgen Paul, Linda Shortt, Andrew J. Webber. Anne Fuchs is Professor of German Literature at the University of St.Andrews, Scotland. Kathleen James-Chakraborty is Professor of Art History at University College Dublin, Ireland. Linda Shortt is Lecturer in German at Bangor University, Wales.




Architecture and Spectacle: A Critique


Book Description

Focusing on six leading contemporary architects: Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Bernard Tschumi, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas and Steven Holl, this book puts forward a unique and insightful analysis of "neo-avant-garde" architecture. It discusses the spectacle and excess which permeates contemporary architecture in reference to the present aesthetic tendency for image making, but does so by applying the tectonic of theatricality discussed by the 19th-century German architect Gottfried Semper. In doing so, it breaks new ground by opening up a dialogue between the study of the past and the design of the present. The work of each discussed architect is seen as addressing a historiographical problem. To this end, and this is the second important aspect of this book, the chosen buildings are discussed in terms of the thematic of the culture of building (the tectonic of column and wall for example) rather the formal, and this through a discussion that is informed by the latest available theories. Having set the aesthetic implication of the processes of the digitalization of architecture, the book's conclusion highlights "strategies" by which architecture might postpone the full consequences of digitalization, and thus the becoming of architecture as ornament on its own right.




Narrating Architecture


Book Description

This anthology brings together the best and most interesting papers from the first ten years of The Journal of Architecture, published together for the first time in a single volume. Covering a wide range of topics of central importance to architecture today, the papers also address the related topics to which architecture and architectural studies are inextricably linked. The invited authors draw on sociology, philosophy, cultural studies and the sciences to round out the collection and highlight the breadth and vitality of modern architectural studies, offering perspectives from different disciplines as well as different corners of the globe.




Berlin Electropolis


Book Description

Berlin Electropolis ties the German discourse on nervousness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to Berlin's transformation into a capital of the second industrial revolution. Focusing on three key groups—railway personnel, soldiers, and telephone operators—Andreas Killen traces the emergence in the 1880s and then later decline of the belief that modernity caused nervous illness. During this period, Killen explains, Berlin became arguably the most advanced metropolis in Europe. A host of changes, many associated with breakthroughs in technologies of transportation, communication, and leisure, combined to radically alter the shape and tempo of everyday life in Berlin. The resulting consciousness of accelerated social change and the shocks and afflictions that accompanied it found their consummate expression in the discourse about nervousness. Wonderfully researched and clearly written, this book offers a wealth of new insights into the nature of the modern metropolis, the psychological aftermath of World War I, and the operations of the German welfare state. Killen also explores cultural attitudes toward electricity, the evolution of psychiatric thought and practice, and the status of women workers in Germany's rapidly industrializing economy. Ultimately, he argues that the backlash against the welfare state that occurred during the late Weimar Republic brought about the final decoupling of modernity and nervous illness.




Metropolis Berlin


Book Description

“Metropolis Berlin evokes a kaleidoscopic panorama of impressions, opinions, and utopian hopes that constituted Berlin from the end of Imperial Germany to the rise of National Socialism. Iain Boyd Whyte and the late David Frisby invite the reader to be a flâneur in a truly great city, to marvel at the vitality of its urban spaces, and to listen to the cacophony of its voices and sounds. This extraordinary anthology of hundreds of documents tells the story of metropolitan Berlin by letting its inhabitants, visitors, and critics speak. A must have for every personal bookshelf and library.”—Volker M. Welter, Professor for Architectural History, University of California at Santa Barbara "Metropolis Berlinis not merely a magnificent compendium of sources, but is also an exciting work of scholarship in its own right. It presents this global city, in all its architectural, urbanistic, and discursive richness and complexity, like no other volume before it."—Frederic J. Schwartz, author of Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany.