New York Modern


Book Description

Handsomely illustrated and engagingly written, New York Modern documents the impressive collective legacy of New York's artists in capturing the energy and emotions of the urban experience.




How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art


Book Description

"A provocative interpretation of the political and cultural history of the early cold war years. . . . By insisting that art, even art of the avant-garde, is part of the general culture, not autonomous or above it, he forces us to think differently not only about art and art history but about society itself."—New York Times Book Review




The Metropolitan Airport


Book Description

John F. Kennedy International Airport is one of New York City's most successful and influential redevelopment projects. Built and defined by outsize personalities—Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, famed urban planner Robert Moses, and Port Authority Executive Director Austin Tobin among them—JFK was fantastically expensive and unprecedented in its scale. By the late 1940s, once-polluted marshlands had become home to one of the world's busiest and most advanced airfields. Almost from the start, however, environmental activists in surrounding neighborhoods and suburbs clashed with the Port Authority. These fierce battles in the long term restricted growth and, compounded by lackluster management and planning, diminished JFK's status and reputation. Yet the airport remained a key contributor to metropolitan vitality: New Yorkers bound for adventure and business still boarded planes headed to distant corners of the globe, billions of tourists and immigrants came and went, and mammoth air cargo facilities bolstered the region's commerce. In The Metropolitan Airport, Nicholas Dagen Bloom chronicles the untold story of JFK International's complicated and turbulent relationship with the New York City metropolitan region. In spite of its reputation for snarled traffic, epic delays, endless construction, and abrasive employees, the airport was a key player in shifting patterns of labor, transportation, and residence; the airport both encouraged and benefited from the dispersion of population and economic activity to the outer boroughs and suburbs. As Bloom shows, airports like JFK are vibrant parts of their cities and powerfully influence urban development. The Metropolitan Airport is an indispensable book for those who wish to understand the revolutionary impact of airports on the modern American city.




Robert Moses and the Modern City


Book Description

A fresh look at the greatest builder in the history of New York City and one of its most controversial figures. “We are rebuilding New York, not dispersing and abandoning it”: Robert Moses saw himself on a rescue mission to save the city from obsolescence, decentralization, and decline. His vast building program aimed to modernize urban infrastructure, expand the public realm with extensive recreational facilities, remove blight, and make the city more livable for the middle class. This book offers a fresh look at the physical transformation of New York during Moses’s nearly forty-year reign over city building from 1934 to 1968.It is hard to imagine that anyone will ever have the same impact on New York as did Robert Moses. In his various roles in city and state government, he reshaped the fabric of the city, and his legacy continues to touch the lives of all New Yorkers. Revered for most of his life, he is now one of the most controversial figures in the city’s history. Robert Moses and the Modern City is the first major publication devoted to him since Robert Caro’s damning 1974 biography, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.In these pages eight short essays by leading scholars of urban history provide a revised perspective; stunning new photographs offer the first visual record of Moses’s far-reaching building program as it stands today; and a comprehensive catalog of his works is illustrated with a wealth of archival records: photographs of buildings, neighborhoods, and landscapes, of parks, pools, and playgrounds, of demolished neighborhoods and replacement housing and urban renewal projects, of bridges and highways; renderings of rejected designs and controversial projects that were defeated; and views of spectacular models that have not been seen since Moses made them for promotional purposes.Robert Moses and the Modern City captures research undertaken in the last three decades and will stimulate a new round of debate.







Tadao Ando


Book Description

The minimalist concrete architecture of Tadao Ando has roots both in Japanese traditions and in Western architecture. This book begins with both contexts: it explores how Ando unites Japanese tradition with a contemporary Western architectural idiom. By analyzing systematically and chronologically the roots and sources that have influenced the thinking of the Pritzker Prize-winning architect, the author communicates the principles and constants to which Ando's buildings can be traced back, and at the same time he places them in the appropriate context within the architect's characteristic ideas and intentions. Yann Nussaume teaches at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'architecture in Paris and is the author of numerous publications on Japanese and Chinese architecture. Die minimalistische Betonarchitektur von Tadao Ando hat ihre Wurzeln sowohl in japanischen Traditionen als auch in der modernen westlichen Architektur. Genau bei diesen Zusammenhängen setzt das Buch an: Es untersucht, auf welche Weise Ando in seinem Werk japanische Tradition und zeitgenössische westliche Architektursprache vereint. Indem der Autor systematisch und chronologisch die Wurzeln und Quellen analysiert, die für das architektonische Denken des Pritzker-Preisträgers prägend sind, vermittelt er die zentralen Grundsätze und Konstanten, auf die sich Andos Bauten zurückführen lassen, und er stellt sie zugleich in den ihnen angemessenen Kontext der besonderen Denkweise und Intentionen des Architekten.




Los Angeles Modern


Book Description

The birthplace of American modernism, Los Angeles is the epicenter for a new way of living for the last one hundred years, as manifested in its cutting-edge architecture and design. With roots in the innovative houses by Frank Lloyd Wright, Greene & Greene, and Rudolph Schindler in the early twentieth century, this constantly evolving city became a crucible of modern living. Inspired by the International Style, architects and designers in Los Angeles developed their own individual styles with a rare sensitivity to site, landscape, and human scale. This brand of modernism, blurring the boundaries of indoors and outdoors, has since been imitated from Seattle to Sydney. Acclaimed architecture and design photographer Tim Street-Porter captures the best Modernist architecture of Los Angeles, from the seminal Neutra houses to the idiosynchratic structures by Frank Gehry. With iconic buildings by Craig Ellwood, Pierre Koenig, John Lautner, Charles and Ray Eames, and Oscar Niemeyer, among others, L.A. Modern presents the full spectrum of Los Angeles modernism in gorgeous new color photography.




Tiny Love Stories


Book Description

“Charming. . . . A moving testament to the diversity and depths of love.” —Publishers Weekly You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll be swept away—in less time than it takes to read this paragraph. Here are 175 true stories—honest, funny, tender and wise—each as moving as a lyric poem, all told in no more than one hundred words. An electrician lights up a woman’s life, a sister longs for her homeless brother, strangers dream of what might have been. Love lost, found and reclaimed. Love that’s romantic, familial, platonic and unexpected. Most of all, these stories celebrate love as it exists in real life: a silly remark that leads to a lifetime together, a father who struggles to remember his son, ordinary moments that burn bright.




Modern New York


Book Description

The economic history of New York is filled with high-stakes drama and big figures. In Modern New York, renowned economist and political commentator Greg David tells the story of the metropolis's financial highs and lows since the 1960s. He takes a hard look at how Wall Street came to dominate the economy in the years following the wrenching decade of the Fiscal Crisis and how New York's high finance roller coaster came to affect the entire city and the world. He tackles the major controversies over real estate development, the growth of inequality, the role of immigration and the prospects for diversification. In addition Modern New York profiles the business and political leaders at the forefront of today's economic issues, as well as the average people who benefit from (and are the casualties of) the structure and cycles of this hub's capricious economy. From covert breakfasts with Wall Street heads to profiles of people like the brilliant but complex economic development artist Dan Doctoroff, Modern New York features all sorts of characters with big personalities and big wallets, from Donald Trump to Michael Bloomberg. This book takes readers on a journey to understanding the machinery and people as well as the spirit of New York. With its many great stories and applicability to other metropolises such as London, Singapore, Sydney, or Hong Kong, it will be relevant to readers around the world..




...isms: Understanding Modern Art


Book Description

An engaging and informative guide to all the significant "isms"—schools and movements—that have shaped modern and contemporary art from Impressionism to the present. Following on the heels of the bestselling Isms: Understanding Modern Art comes this handy small-format guide to the history and development of modern art since the Impressionist era. Loaded with reproductions of key artworks and rounded out with a glossary and index of names, this guide is the best single-volume concise introduction to modern art for beginners, as well as an engaging new way of conceptualizing modern art for aficionados and collectors. ...isms: Understanding Modern Art sorts art into a chronological sequence of more than 55 movements and schools, or "isms." Beginning with Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism, and Symbolism, it progresses through all the major and minor art movements of the twentieth century (Fauvism, German Expressionism, Futurism, Dadaism, and Social Realism among others) through the postwar era up to the present. Featuring 110 beautiful full-color reproductions of key artworks illustrating the important concepts of each artistic movement, ...isms: Understanding Modern Art is like a virtual gallery of the finest modern masters. Included are a glossary, a list of principal names (artists, collectors, patrons), a gazetteer, and a chronology, making this the best single-volume guide to modern art for beginners while also offering cognoscenti an intriguing new way of conceptualizing the visual arts of the modern era.