Gordon Bunshaft and SOM

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Author :
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300227477
Total Pages : 297 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis Gordon Bunshaft and SOM by : Nicholas Adams

Download or read book Gordon Bunshaft and SOM written by Nicholas Adams and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-11 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This nuanced portrait of Gordon Bunshaft and his work for the architecture firm SOM explores his role in defining the built aesthetic of corporate America.

Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

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Author :
Publisher : MIT Press (MA)
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 388 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill by : Carol Herselle Krinsky

Download or read book Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill written by Carol Herselle Krinsky and published by MIT Press (MA). This book was released on 1988 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carol Herselle Krinsky's analysis of Bunshaft's work is the first complete study of this important and at times difficult architect

SOM

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Author :
Publisher : The Monacelli Press, LLC
ISBN 13 : 1580935559
Total Pages : 249 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (89 download)

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Book Synopsis SOM by : SOM

Download or read book SOM written by SOM and published by The Monacelli Press, LLC. This book was released on 2021-07-20 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Legendary architecture practice SOM presents 40+ of their most transformative works in the sixth and latest volume, SOM: Works by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 2009-2019. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) is one of the most influential architecture studios in the world, with a body of work that includes some of the most important buildings and urban designs of our time. SOM: Works by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 2009-2019 is the sixth and latest volume in the series to cover every era of SOM’s history, from the iconic Modernist works of the 1950s to the projects of today. Documenting SOM’s global body of work—which ranges from a prototype for a biophilic breathing wall to the new headquarters for NATO in Brussels—SOM: Works by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 2009-2019 demonstrates how SOM has come to hold its unparalleled position as a steward of international architecture. This new volume details SOM’s approach to designing impactful, complex projects in a globalized world—an approach which marries a deep bench of global expertise with a commitment to honoring culture and people in the communities where SOM works. In this volume, explore SOM’s mission to address the most urgent challenge of our time: climate change. Working in pursuit of a zero-carbon built world, SOM’s designers are pioneering new approaches to adaptive reuse, cultivating emerging technologies including machine learning, inventing new tools to optimize building performance, and beyond. Organized chronologically, the monograph encompasses SOM’s most significant projects of the past decade, across all building types and locations, highlighting the studio’s unique ability to design and execute complex, technical, and efficient structures. The roster includes Burj Khalifa—the tallest building in the world, Manhattan Loft Gardens, a new vertical community in London, the twisting Ningbo Bank of China headquarters, the ‘floating cube’ new Federal Courthouse in Los Angeles, the master plan for the Cornell Tech Campus on Roosevelt Island, the reimagined Strand Theatre in San Francisco, Chicago’s Optimo Hat Company Headquarters, Denver Union Station, and of course, One World Trade Center. Through in-depth essays, architecture writer and critic Sam Lubell dives into SOM’s radically rigorous approach to design in today’s complex world, exploring the unique ideas cultivated within the studio and how those ideas are transformed into transformative spaces across the globe. As with the previous five volumes in the series, renowned design studio Pentagram led the book’s design in collaboration with SOM. Featuring 500 images, the book includes thorough profiles and never-before-published photographs, plans, and drawings of the studio’s most recent works.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

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Author :
Publisher : Phaidon Press
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 344 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Skidmore, Owings & Merrill by : Nicholas Adams

Download or read book Skidmore, Owings & Merrill written by Nicholas Adams and published by Phaidon Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surveys thirty of the most iconic buildings designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), the legendary American architecture firm, since its founding in 1936.

The North Atlantic Cities

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Author :
Publisher : Oro Editions
ISBN 13 : 9781908457530
Total Pages : 279 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (575 download)

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Book Synopsis The North Atlantic Cities by : Charles Duff

Download or read book The North Atlantic Cities written by Charles Duff and published by Oro Editions. This book was released on 2021-07-15 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The North Atlantic Cities by Charles B. Duff, which is available for the first time in the United States, is a book on urban development and urban life masquerading as a book on architecture. It is the story of four hundred years of architecture and urban development in four countries: the Netherlands, Great Britain, Ireland, and the United States, particularly cities like New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Baltimore, Savannah, to name a few. The author starts with a kind of building few others have considered--the row house--which could very well be the key to understanding why many of the world's great cities look and function as they do. From the 1600s to today as the author theorizes, this innocuous-seeming housing type is perhaps the antidote to suburban sprawl, urban decay, and the worst catastrophes of global climate change.

Imagining the Modern

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Author :
Publisher : The Monacelli Press, LLC
ISBN 13 : 1580935230
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (89 download)

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Book Synopsis Imagining the Modern by : Rami el Samahy

Download or read book Imagining the Modern written by Rami el Samahy and published by The Monacelli Press, LLC. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagining the Modern explores Pittsburgh's ambitious modern architecture and urban renewal program that made it a gem of American postwar cities, and set the stage for its stature today. In the 1950s and '60s an ambitious program of urban revitalization transformed Pittsburgh and became a model for other American cities. Billed as the Pittsburgh Renaissance, this era of superlatives--the city claimed the tallest aluminum clad building, the world's largest retractable dome, the tallest steel structure--developed through visionary mayors and business leaders, powerful urban planning authorities, and architects and urban designers of international renown, including Frank Lloyd Wright, I.M. Pei, Mies van der Rohe, SOM, and Harrison & Abramovitz. These leaders, civic groups, and architects worked together to reconceive the city through local and federal initiatives that aimed to address the problems that confronted Pittsburgh's postwar development. Initiated as an award-winning exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 2014, Imagining the Modern untangles this complicated relationship with modern architecture and planning through a history of Pittsburgh's major sites, protagonists, and voices of intervention. Through original documentation, photographs and drawings, as well as essays, analytical drawings, and interviews with participants, this book provides a nuanced view of this crucial moment in Pittsburgh's evolution. Addressing both positive and negative impacts of the era, Imagining the Modern examines what took place during the city's urban renewal era, what was gained and lost, and what these histories might suggest for the city's future.

George Platt Lynes

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Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190219661
Total Pages : 665 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (92 download)

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Book Synopsis George Platt Lynes by : Allen Ellenzweig

Download or read book George Platt Lynes written by Allen Ellenzweig and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 665 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye is a life of the gregarious American portrait, dance, fashion, and male nude photographer whose career spanned the late 1920s to 1955. From age 18, Lynes entered the cosmopolitan world of the American expatriate community in Paris when he became acquainted with the salon of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Intending to pursue a literary and small press publishing career, Lynes also began photographing authors like Stein, Jean Cocteau, André Gide, and Colette. Soon, he turned exclusively to photography, establishing himself as one of the premier fashion photographers in the Condé Nast stable, documenting the early ballets of George Balanchine, and pursuing his private obsession with seductive images of young male nudes almost never published in his time. Lynes's private life was as glamorous and theatrical as his images with their brilliant studio lighting and dramatic Surrealist set-ups. Barely out his teens, he met the publisher Monroe Wheeler who was already in a relationship with the emerging expatriate novelist Glenway Wescott. The peripatetic threesome maintained a polyamorous connection that lasted some 15 years. Their New York apartment became a mecca for elegant cocktail and name-dropping dinner parties. Their ménage-à-trois complicates our understanding of the pre-Stonewall gay closet. This biography, drawing upon intimate letters and an unpublished memoir of Lynes's life by his brother, writer and editor Russell Lynes, paints a portrait of the emerging influence of gays and lesbians in the visual, literary, and performing arts that defined transatlantic cosmopolitan culture and presaged later gay political activism.

The Beinecke Library of Yale University

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780300133981
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (339 download)

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Book Synopsis The Beinecke Library of Yale University by : Stephen Parks

Download or read book The Beinecke Library of Yale University written by Stephen Parks and published by . This book was released on 2003-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University celebrates its fortieth anniversary with an exhibition and with this book that is itself a celebration of a great architectural monument of modernism photographed by Richard Cheek. This striking building contains a stunning collection of collections, examples from which were photographed by Stan Godlewski, and this celebratory volume also contains a portfolio of photographs taken at the time of the dedication forty years ago by Ezra Stoller and a handful of historic photographs from collections here. The text has a number of essays that together capture the many resourses that constitute this library distinguished throughout the world for its collections and for its support of research and publications and teaching. Following an introductory essay by Barbara A. Shailor written from the perspective of one who came to join the staff as a graduate student employed to catalogue ancient manuscripts. This she did for two decades before leaving for university teaching and a deanship before returning here recently as director. The history of the design, construction, and impact of the building is acheived in a critical and appreciative essay by Patrick L. Pinnell, practicing architect and planner, who carries the story from the selection of Gordon Bunshaft as architect to the present place of this magnificent building at the center of te Yale Campus. Next comes a memoir by Marjorie G. Wynne about the days before there was a Beinecke Library when the rare books and manuscripts were in the Rare Book Room at Sterling Library until she and that collection crossed the street forty yearsago. Following these are essays about the individual strengths of the collections that together are the Beinecke's chief joys. Robert G. Babcock describes early manuscripts and books while the modern counterparts are featured by Vincent Giroud who also contributed an essay on music in the Beinecke. A brief section on playing cards by Timothy G. Young is included. Patricia C. Willis discusses the Collection of American Literature and Stephen Parks describes the Osborn Collection. German Literature is treated by Christa Sammons and George A. Miles treats the Western Americana Collection. The Beinecke Library is all this and more, perhaps the most distinguished gathering of literary and historic material of any private university in the Americas and perhaps in the world. Supported wholly from endowments and managed as a financially independent unit within the Yale library system, it serves a broad community of users. It has an active fellowship program bringing researchers from across the campus and across the world to this repository of printed books and manuscripts as well as extensive collections of maps, prints, photographs, and drawings in the fields of language, literature, history, religion, philosophy, art, music, economics, and the natural sciences. The book itself is a cause for celebration, designed by Greer Allen and composed and printed to the high standards that he earlier had exercised as University Printer. The result of all of these efforts is a triumph of text and illustrations combined in a generous format to delight the eye and the mind.

Wayne Thom

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Publisher : The Monacelli Press, LLC
ISBN 13 : 1580935575
Total Pages : 249 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (89 download)

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Book Synopsis Wayne Thom by : Emily Bills

Download or read book Wayne Thom written by Emily Bills and published by The Monacelli Press, LLC. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first monograph of photographer Wayne Thom, whose documentation of Late Modern architecture constitutes an architectural/visual archive unlike any other. A key primer to late-twentieth century Modernism, this monograph devoted to Wayne Thom chronicles his photographic practice and the architectural and urban environment in which he worked. An innovative chronicler of the booming West Coast urbanism of the 1960s and 70s, Thom’s photographs of key projects by path-breaking architecture firms such as William Pereira & Associates, Edward Durell Stone, SOM, Gio Ponti, John Portman, I. M. Pei, and A. Quincy Jones helped establish the idea of cool architectural glamour of the era. Raised in Hong Kong, Thom moved to California in the mid-1960s and trained in the technical craftsmanship of photography, adept at harnessing natural light for both interior and exterior compositions. He soon began working with the figures who would become his clients and benefactors, most importantly William Pereira and A. Quincy Jones, a prolific architect and Dean of the School of Architecture at USC. As Emily Bills critically assess Thom’s career, she demonstrates that his photography became inseparable from Late Modernism in the popular imagination, a period of architectural production that ran from the late 1960s through the 1980s. Wayne Thom: Photographing the Late Modern is a celebration of this key architectural photographer and a unique chronicle of the works of this transformative period of architectural expression.

Building Seagram

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780300167672
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (676 download)

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Book Synopsis Building Seagram by : Phyllis Lambert

Download or read book Building Seagram written by Phyllis Lambert and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building Seagram is a comprehensive personal and scholarly history of a major building and its architectural, cultural, and urban legacies.

Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

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Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 146 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (15 download)

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Book Synopsis Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden by : United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Public Works. Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds

Download or read book Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden written by United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Public Works. Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds and published by . This book was released on 1966 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Material Strategies

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Publisher : Princeton Architectural Press
ISBN 13 : 1616891890
Total Pages : 162 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (168 download)

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Book Synopsis Material Strategies by : Blaine Brownell

Download or read book Material Strategies written by Blaine Brownell and published by Princeton Architectural Press. This book was released on 2013-07-02 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blaine Brownell s best-selling Transmaterial series has introduced designers to hundreds of emergent materials that have the potential to transform our built environment. In our new Architecture Brief, Material Strategies, Brownell shows architects how creative applications of these materials achieve such transformations. Chapters based on fundamental material categories examine historical precedents, current opportunities, and future environmental challenges. Case studies featuring detailed illustrations showcase pioneering buildings from today s most forward-thinking architectural firms.

Writing About Architecture

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Publisher : Chronicle Books
ISBN 13 : 1616890533
Total Pages : 194 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (168 download)

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Book Synopsis Writing About Architecture by : Alexandra Lange

Download or read book Writing About Architecture written by Alexandra Lange and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2012-02-29 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Extraordinary architecture addresses so much more than mere practical considerations. It inspires and provokes while creating a seamless experience of the physical world for its users. It is the rare writer that can frame the discussion of a building in a way that allows the reader to see it with new eyes. Writing About Architecture is a handbook on writing effectively and critically about buildings and cities. Each chapter opens with a reprint of a significant essay written by a renowned architecture critic, followed by a close reading and discussion of the writer's strategies. Lange offers her own analysis using contemporary examples as well as a checklist of questions at the end of each chapter to help guide the writer. This important addition to the Architecture Briefs series is based on the author's design writing courses at New York University and the School of Visual Arts. Lange also writes a popular online column for Design Observer and has written for Dwell, Metropolis, New York magazine, and The New York Times. Writing About Architecture includes analysis of critical writings by Ada Louise Huxtable, Lewis Mumford, Herbert Muschamp, Michael Sorkin, Charles Moore, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Jane Jacobs. Architects covered include Marcel Breuer, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Field Operations, Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, Frederick Law Olmsted, SOM, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

The Architecture of Paul Rudolph

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Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300149395
Total Pages : 301 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (1 download)

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Book Synopsis The Architecture of Paul Rudolph by : Timothy M. Rohan

Download or read book The Architecture of Paul Rudolph written by Timothy M. Rohan and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-10 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Equally admired and maligned for his remarkable Brutalist buildings, Paul Rudolph (1918–1997) shaped both late modernist architecture and a generation of architects while chairing Yale’s department of architecture from 1958 to 1965. Based on extensive archival research and unpublished materials, The ArchitectureofPaul Rudolph is the first in-depth study of the architect, neglected since his postwar zenith. Author Timothy M. Rohan unearths the ideas that informed Rudolph’s architecture, from his Florida beach houses of the 1940s to his concrete buildings of the 1960s to his lesser-known East Asian skyscrapers of the 1990s. Situating Rudolph within the architectural discourse of his day, Rohan shows how Rudolph countered the perceived monotony of mid-century modernism with a dramatically expressive architecture for postwar America, exemplified by his Yale Art and Architecture Building of 1963, famously clad in corrugated concrete. The fascinating story of Rudolph’s spectacular rise and fall considerably deepens longstanding conceptions about postwar architecture: Rudolph emerges as a pivotal figure who anticipated new directions for architecture, ranging from postmodernism to sustainability.

Roger Fry and Italian Art

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Author :
Publisher : Paul Holberton publishing
ISBN 13 : 9781912168088
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (68 download)

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Book Synopsis Roger Fry and Italian Art by : Caroline Elam

Download or read book Roger Fry and Italian Art written by Caroline Elam and published by Paul Holberton publishing. This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roger Fry (1866-1934) is best known as a champion of Post-Impressionism and a pioneer of Modernist art criticism. But his fi rst love was early Italian painting, on which he became a recognized authority, publishing a monograph on Giovanni Bellini in 1899. Even after the Post-Impressionist exhibitions in 1910 and 1912 and the foundation of the Omega Workshops, Fry continued to write and lecture on Italianart right up until his death. He looked at modernism through Quattrocento eyes rather than the other way around, as is often wrongly assumed. It is impossible not to be struck by how fresh and immediately readable his writings are, how pioneering in some ways his approach remains. His work on Italian art modifi es the received view of him as a pure formalist. Apart from a famous article on Giotto which Fry republished in Vision and Design (1920), the writings on Italian art are relatively little known, and a selection of the best of them is republished here, thus introducing an important aspect of Fry's many-sided work to a new audience. The fi rst part of the book sets Fry's writing on Italian art into context by combining intellectual biography with the history of art history, art criticism and art institutions. It draws on new documentary material, including Fry's travel notebooks, which contain sketches and brilliant observations taken down in front of works of art. By exploring the whole range of Fry's published and unpublished writings, theauthor is able to refute erroneous received ideas - that he was uninterested in colour, for example. The infl uence of his Italian lectures and publications on such fi gures as E.M. Forster, Kenneth Clark and Michael Baxandall is also examined. The second part consists of writings by Fry - each with an introductory text by the author and fully illustrated in colour. Included in this volume are some of the unpublished lectures that his biographer Virginia Woolf suggested would make a fascinating book of extracts. Four long pieces are of outstanding interest - on Uccello, Piero della Francesca, Baldovinetti and Piero di Cosimo, all artists whose critical status was radically re-examined in the twentieth century. Fry had a close and lifelong connection with The Burlington Magazine, as cofounder, contributor, saviour-fundraiser, editor (1909-1919) and adviser. Roger Fry and Italian Art is appropriately the fi rst in a series of books on art history to be published by The Burlington Magazine and Ad Ilissvm in association - to be announced in due course.

Master of the Midcentury

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Publisher : The Monacelli Press, LLC
ISBN 13 : 1580935303
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (89 download)

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Book Synopsis Master of the Midcentury by : Catherine Cody

Download or read book Master of the Midcentury written by Catherine Cody and published by The Monacelli Press, LLC. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Master of the Midcentury: The Architecture of William F. Cody is the first, long-overdue book on this key Palm Springs architect, abundantly illustrated and detailed. Of the architects who made Palm Springs a crucible of midcentury American modernism, William F. Cody (1916-1978) was one of the most prolific, diverse, and iconic. Directing a practice ranging from residences to commercial centers and industrial complexes to master plans, Cody's designs are so recognizable that they provide visual shorthand for what is widely hailed as "Desert Modern." While his architecture was disciplined and technically innovative, Cody did not practice an austere modernism; he imbued in his projects a love for social spaces, rich with patterns, texture, color, and art. Though the majority of Cody's built work was concentrated in California and Arizona, he had commissions in other western states, Hawaii, Mexico, Honduras, and Cuba. From icons like the Del Marcos Hotel (1946), to inventive country clubs like the Eldorado (1957), to houses for celebrities (Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Walt Disney), Cody's projects defined the emerging West Coast lifestyle that combined luxury, leisure, and experimental design. Cody also pushed the boundaries of engineering, with beams and roof slabs so thin that his buildings seemed to defy gravity. Master of the Midcentury is the first monograph devoted to Cody, authored by the team that curated the acclaimed exhibition Fast Forward: The Architecture of William F. Cody at the Architecture and Design Museum in Los Angeles: his daughter, Cathy Cody, design historian Jo Lauria, and architectural historian Don Choi. Replete with photographs of extant and now-lost structures, as well as masterful color renderings and drawings for architectural commissions and plans for vanguard building systems, Master of the Midcentury is the authoritative resource on Cody.

Broken Glass

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Author :
Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN 13 : 0399592733
Total Pages : 369 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (995 download)

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Book Synopsis Broken Glass by : Alex Beam

Download or read book Broken Glass written by Alex Beam and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story of the intimate relationship that gave birth to the Farnsworth House, a masterpiece of twentieth-century architecture—and disintegrated into a bitter feud over love, money, gender, and the very nature of art. “An intimate portrait . . . alive with architectural intrigue.”—Architect Magazine In 1945, Edith Farnsworth asked the German architect Mies van der Rohe, already renowned for his avant-garde buildings, to design a weekend home for her outside of Chicago. Edith was a woman ahead of her time—unmarried, she was a distinguished medical researcher, as well as an accomplished violinist, translator, and poet. The two quickly began spending weekends together, talking philosophy, Catholic mysticism, and, of course, architecture over wine-soaked picnic lunches. Their personal and professional collaboration would produce the Farnsworth House, one of the most important works of architecture of all time, a blindingly original structure made up almost entirely of glass and steel. But the minimalist marvel, built in 1951, was plagued by cost overruns and a sudden chilling of the two friends’ mutual affection. Though the building became world famous, Edith found it impossible to live in, because of its constant leaks, flooding, and complete lack of privacy. Alienated and aggrieved, she lent her name to a public campaign against Mies, cheered on by Frank Lloyd Wright. Mies, in turn, sued her for unpaid monies. The ensuing lengthy trial heard evidence of purported incompetence by an acclaimed architect, and allegations of psychological cruelty and emotional trauma. A commercial dispute litigated in a rural Illinois courthouse became a trial of modernist art and architecture itself. Interweaving personal drama and cultural history, Alex Beam presents a stylish, enthralling narrative tapestry, illuminating the fascinating history behind one of the twentieth century’s most beautiful and significant architectural projects.