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This 1889 text by a noted Austrian architect and urban planner ignited a new age of city planning. Inspired by medieval and baroque designs, Sitte emphasized the creation of spacious plazas, enhanced by monuments and other aesthetic elements. Numerous illustrations, plus extensive commentary, notes, and bibliography.
"Werner Hegemann (1881-1936), a German-born multidisciplinary critic of the built environment, was well known in Europe and the United States in his lifetime. A critic rather than a designer, he did not fit easily into any school or category. To those seeking to promote modernism, Hegemann was something of an awkward figure - influential and undoubtedly authoritative but unorthodox. Today, however, when studies of modernism have largely shed their proselytizing role, he is of great relevance. Our interest now is less in those who proposed the answers than in those who asked the questions - and particularly the way in which those questions were framed. For this Hegemann is a key figure." "Based on documentation largely unavailable in English - including Hegemann's published and unpublished writings, his correspondence, his diaries, the author's interviews, archival materials lent to her by Hegemann's widow, and the author's own substantial collection - this is the first comprehensive study of Hegemann for historians, architects, and urbanists."--BOOK JACKET.
A Storm Foretold: Columbia University and Morningside Heights, 1968 offers an eyewitness account of the famous confrontation between Columbia and its surrounding community, one of the pivotal civil rights battles that characterized the sixties. Focused from the point of view of urban planning, author and urban historian Christiane Crasemann Collins provides firsthand insight into a preeminent institution's racially motivated tactics. With extensive research, architectural maps, and photos of the protests, A Storm Foretold shows how the university pursued the goal of creating an exclusive white acropolis on the Hudson, justified as a "need for expansion." Beginning with a plan to acquire prop...
This classic is organized as follows: I. The Relationship Between Buildings, Monuments, and Public Squares II. Open Centers of Public Places III. The Enclosed Character of the Public Square IV. The Form and Expanse of Public Squares V. The Irregularity of Ancient Public Squares VI. Groups of Public Squares VII. Arrangement of Public Squares in Northern Europe VIII. The Artless and Prosaic Character of Modern City Planning IX. Modern Systems X. Modern Limitations on Art in City Planning XI. Improved Modern Systems XII. Artistic Principles in City Planning— An Illustration XIII. Conclusion
These essays, from leading names in the field, weave together the parallels and differences between the past and present of civic art. Offering prospects for the first decades of the twenty-first century, the authors open up a broad international dialogue on civic art, which relates historical practice to the contemporary meaning of civic art and its application to community building within today’s multi-cultural modern cities. The volume brings together the rich perspectives on the thought, practice and influence of leading figures from the great era of civic art that began in the nineteenth century and blossomed in the early twentieth century as documented in the works of Werner Hegemann and his contemporaries and considered fundamental to contemporary practice.
This book is the first English translation of the German architect Bruno Taut’s early twentieth-century anthology Die Stadtkrone (The City Crown). Written under the influence of World War I, Taut developed The City Crown to promote a utopian urban concept where people would live in a garden city of ’apolitical socialism’ and peaceful collaboration around a single purpose-free crystalline structure. Taut’s proposal sought to advance the garden city idea of Ebenezer Howard and rural aesthetic of Camillo Sitte’s urban planning schemes by merging them with his own ’city crown’ concept. The book also contains contributions by the Expressionist poet Paul Scheerbart, the writer and po...
Hendrik Petrus Berlage, the Dutch architect and architectural philosopher, created a series of buildings and a body of writings from 1886 to 1909 that were among the first efforts to probe the problems and possibilities of modernism. Although his Amsterdam Stock Exchange, with its rational mastery of materials and space, has long been celebrated for its seminal influence on the architecture of the 20th century, Berlage's writings are highlighted here. Bringing together Berlage's most important texts, among them "Thoughts on Style in Architecture", "Architecture's Place in Modern Aesthetics", and "Art and Society", this volume presents a chapter in the history of European modernism. In his introduction, Iain Boyd Whyte demonstrates that the substantial contribution of Berlage's designs to modern architecture cannot be fully appreciated without an understanding of the aesthetic principles first laid out in his writings.
A landmark text in design discourse for a world desperately in need of redesign--back in print What good is design? In a world facing social unrest, political tribalism, and impending ecological doom, Tomás Maldonado poses philosophical inquiries into the role design plays during a moment of crisis and analyzes what "design" might mean as an ever-enlarging compass beyond stylization of specific objects. He discusses how design is both influenced by and central to ecological crisis. Written as a kind of obituary to the Modern movement's wave of failed "concrete utopias," Maldonado combines philosophy, sociology, radical countercultural thought, and the ecological sciences into a polemic that recenters design in the human environment.