Mediterranean Modernism


Book Description

This book explores how Modernist movements all across the Mediterranean basin differed from those of other regions. The chapters show how the political and economic turmoil of a period marked by world war, revolution, decolonization, nationalism, and the rapid advance of new technologies compelled artists, writers, and other intellectuals to create a new hybrid Mediterranean Modernist aesthetic which sought to balance the tensions between local and foreign, tradition and innovation, and colonial and postcolonial.




Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean


Book Description

Considering the influence of the forms and tectonics of the Mediterranean vernacular on modern architectural practice and discourse from the 1920s to the 1960s.




Modernism and the Mediterranean


Book Description

Situated in a Mediterranean landscape, the Maeght Foundation is a unique Modernist museum, product of an extraordinary collaboration between the architect, Jos?uis Sert, and the artists whose work was to be displayed there. The architecture, garden design and art offer a rare opportunity to see work in settings conceived in active collaboration with the artists themselves. By focusing on the relationship between this art foundation and its Arcadian setting, including Joan Mir?labyrinth, George Braque's pool, Tal-Coat's mosaic wall and Giacometti's terrace, Jan K. Birksted demonstrates how the building articulates many of the ideas that preoccupied this group of artists during the culminating years of their lives. The study pays special attention to the ways in which architecture can shape the experience of time, and addresses the Modernist desire for wilderness and its problematic roots in the classical Mediterranean ideal. In showing how the design of the Maeght Foundation is a Modernist representation of Mediterranean culture, the author has developed an interpretation of architecture that accommodates not only the architect's handling of material or function, but shows as well how it can be the embodiment of a particular vision of space and time.




Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean


Book Description

The Islamic world's artistic traditions experienced profound transformation in the 19th century as rapidly developing technologies and globalizing markets ushered in drastic changes in technique, style, and content. Despite the importance and ingenuity of these developments, the 19th century remains a gap in the history of Islamic art. To fill this opening in art historical scholarship, Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean charts transformations in image-making, architecture, and craft production in the Islamic world from Fez to Istanbul. Contributors focus on the shifting methods of production, reproduction, circulation, and exchange artists faced as they worked in fields such as photography, weaving, design, metalwork, ceramics, and even transportation. Covering a range of media and a wide geographical spread, Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean reveals how 19th-century artists in the Middle East and North Africa reckoned with new tools, materials, and tastes from local perspectives.




Mediterranean Modern


Book Description

Endless sun, sparkling sea, crystalline sky these are the elements of the Mediterranean that offer its inhabitants a lifestyle that is the envy of the world and have delighted architects since antiquity. A fusion of interior style and architecture, of glorious natural landscapes and bold man-made forms, "Mediterranean Modern" presents twenty-five of the region's most covetable houses in a format that speaks directly to today's increasingly design-savvy house-dwellers. It includes work by internationally established architects, such as Alberto Campo de Baeza and Alvaro Siza, and also houses by a number of the regions rising stars revealing a wealth of cool ideas for hot climates.




Mediterranean Modernisms


Book Description

Engaging with the work of Nobel Prize-winning poet Odysseus Elytis within the framework of international modernism, Marinos Pourgouris places the poet's work in the context of other modernist thinkers in Europe, including Albert Camus, Charles Baudelaire, Gaston Bachelard, Sigmund Freud, and C. G. Jung. Informed by extensive research in the United States and Europe, Pourgouris's study is one of the most compelling contributions to the comparative study of Greek modernism, the Mediterranean, and the work of Odysseus Elytis.




Modern Art and the Idea of the Mediterranean


Book Description

The Mediterranean is an invented cultural space, on the frontier between North and South, West and East. Modern Art and the Idea of the Mediterranean examines the representation of this region in the visual arts since the late eighteenth century, placing the 'idea of the Mediterranean' - a cultural construct rather than a physical reality - at the centre of our understanding of modern visual culture. This collection of essays features an international group of scholars who examine competing visions of the Mediterranean in terms of modernity and cultural identity, questioning and illuminating both European and non-European representations. An introductory essay frames the analysis in terms of a new spatial paradigm of the Mediterranean as a geographic, historical, and cultural region that emerged in the late eighteenth century, as France and Britain colonized the surrounding territories. Essays are grouped around three vital themes: visualization of the space of the new Mediterranean; varied uses of the classical paradigm; and issues of identity and resistance in an age of modernity and colonialism. Drawing on recent geographical, historical, cultural and anthropological studies, contributors address the visual representation of identity in both the European and the 'Oriental, ' the colonial and post-colonial Mediterranean.




Modernism and the Middle East


Book Description

This provocative collection of essays is the first book-length treatment of the development of modern architecture in the Middle East. Ranging from Jerusalem at the turn of the twentieth century to Libya under Italian colonial rule, postwar Turkey, and on to present-day Iraq, the essays cohere around the historical encounter between the politics of nation-building and architectural modernism's new materials, methods, and motives. Architecture, as physical infrastructure and as symbolic expression, provides an exceptional window onto the powerful forces that shaped the modern Middle East and that continue to dominate it today. Experts in this volume demonstrate the political dimensions of both creating the built environment and, subsequently, inhabiting it. In revealing the tensions between achieving both international relevance and regional meaning, Modernism in the Middle East affords a dynamic view of the ongoing confrontations of deep traditions with rapid modernization. Political and cultural historians, as well as architects and urban planners, will find fresh material here on a range of diverse practices.




Dalmatia and the Mediterranean


Book Description

Using the Braudelian concept of the Mediterranean this volume focuses on the condition of “coastal exchanges” involving the Dalmatian littoral and its Adriatic and more distant maritime network. Spalato and Ragusa intersect with Constantinople, Cairo and Spanish Naples just as Sinan, Palladio and Robert Adam cross paths in this liquid expanse. Concentrating on materiality and on the arts, architecture in particular, the authors identify portability and hybridity as characteristic of these exchanges, and tease out expected and unexpected serendipitous moments when they occurred. Focusing on translation and its instruments these essays expand the traditional concept of influence by thrusting mobility and the "hardware" of cultural transmission, its mechanisms, rather than its effects, into the foreground. Contributors include: Doris Behrens-Abouseif, SOAS, University of London; Joško Belamarić, Institute of Art History, Split; Marzia Faietti, Uffizi, Florence; Jasenka Gudelj, University of Zagreb; Cemal Kafadar, Harvard University; Ioli Kalavrezou, Harvard University; Suzanne Marchand, State University of Louisiana; Erika Naginski, Harvard University; Gülru Necipoğlu, Harvard University; Goran Nikšić, City of Split, Split; Alina Payne, Harvard University; Avinoam Shalem, Columbia University and David Young Kim, University of Pennsylvania




The New Mediterranean


Book Description

A modernist take on Mediterranean aesthetics, a new movement in interior design embraces sumptuous minimalism through warm, earthy tones, and natural materials. In southern locations such as Australia, California, and Brazil, but also in places like New York and Copenhagen--the Mediterranean sensibility echoes itself in these locales through a variety of reasons, be it former colonial influences, a similar sunny climate, or simply an appreciation for the Mediterranean way of life. The New Mediterranean -- Homes and Interiors under the Southern Sun showcases inspiring residences and vacation homes around the world that combine rustic, earthy tones with colorful fabrics, ceramics and glass. The book introduces the designers, architects, and brands who are bringing the style to life, outlining key elements in order to show how to create this look at home. More than a design trend, this is a philosophy to transform interiors into havens of light, craftsmanship, and simplicity.