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Scholars have long stressed the problem of ornament and expression when considering Viennese modernism. By the first decade of the 20th century, however, the avant-garde had shifted its focus from the surface to the interior. Adolf Loos (1870–1933), together with Josef Frank (1885–1967) and Oskar Strnad (1879–1935), led this generation of architects to interpret modernism through culture and lifestyle. They were interested in the experience of architectural space: how it could be navigated, inhabited, and designed to reflect the modern way of life while also offering respite from it. The New Space traces the theoretical conversation about space carried out in the writings and built works of Loos, Frank, and Strnad over four decades. The three ultimately explored what Le Corbusier would later—independently—term the architectural promenade. Lavishly illustrated with new photography and architectural plans, this important book enhances our understanding of the development of modernism and of architectural theory and practice.
The Memory Factory introduces an English-speaking public to the significant women artists of Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century, each chosen for her aesthetic innovations and participation in public exhibitions. These women played important public roles as exhibiting artists, both individually and in collectives, but this history has been silenced over time. Their stories show that the city of Vienna was contradictory and cosmopolitan: despite men-only policies in its main art institutions, it offered a myriad of unexpected ways for women artists to forge successful public careers. Women artists came from the provinces, Russia, and Germany to participate in its vibrant art scene. Ho...
Spurred by ideals of individual liberty that took hold in the Western world in the late nineteenth century, psychiatrists and public officials sought to reinvent asylums as large-scale, totally designed institutions that offered a level of freedom and normality impossible in the outside world. This volume explores the “caged freedom” that this new psychiatric ethos represented by analyzing seven such buildings established in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy between the late 1890s and World War I. In the last two decades of the Habsburg Empire, architects of asylums began to abandon traditional corridor-based plans in favor of looser formations of connected villas, echoing through design the...
In Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century the question of what it meant to be modern was a heated topic of debate. Focusing on interior design, fashion and photography, as well as on painting and architecture, this study casts fresh light on the vital role of the arts in these debates. The 'new' art and literature was crucial in defining a distinctive Viennese modernity while at the same time challenging preconceptions about modern urban life. Many artists and writers produced work that questioned and undermined oppositions between city and country, interior spaces and panoramic views, masculinity and femininity. Issues of gender and the representation of the body were particularly impo...
"Case studies explore the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem, whose efforts to use art to create a Jewish nationality in Palestine raise important issues of national identity, and the discovery in 1932 of the third-century Synagogue of Dura Europos, a symbol for scholars struggling against the Third Reich. Among those who supported or challenged concepts of Jewish art, Margaret Olin considers the nineteenth-century rabbinical scholar David Kaufmann, the philosopher Martin Buber, the critic Clement Greenberg, and the filmmaker Chantal Akerman.
Martin Buber and friends successfully lobbied the congress for inclusion of cultural Zionism into the official agenda of the Zionist organization, resulting in the establishment of the Bezalel Art Institute in Jerusalem in 1905. In the first book of its kind, Gilya Gerda Schmidt places this art exhibition in the context of political Zionism as well as anti-Semitism. Jews had been denied the opportunity to be creative, and religious Zionists feared that Jewish culture would usurp religion within the Zionist movement. Hermann Struck, an artist and Orthodox Jew, became a founding member of the religious Zionist Party, further supporting Buber's assertion that culture and religion were not at odds. The forty-eight works of art in the exhibition were created by eleven artists, all but two of whom were famous in their lifetime. Until now, their works had been largely forgotten. In the last decade, contributing artists—Ephraim Lilien, Lesser Ury, Jozef Israels, Struck, and Maurycy Gottlieb—have enjoyed a revival of their work.
Encyclopedic in its coverage, this seminal work focuses on the architecture of Prague from the turn of the century to the end of the Second World War: a rich matrix within which to place the figures who created the powerful, innovative spirits of modern Czech architecture. The book documents the architects, structures, and theoretical underpinnings that helped to shape Prague's cultural heritage and present-day artistic spirit.
Architect, designer, and theorist Josef Frank (1885-1967) was known throughout Europe in the 1920s as one of the continent's leading modernists. Yet despite his important contributions to the development of modernism, Frank has been largely excluded from histories of the movement. Josef Frank: Life and Work is the first study that comprehensively explores the life, ideas, and designs of this complex and controversial figure. Educated in Vienna just after the turn of the century, Frank became the leader of the younger generation of architects in Austria after the First World War. But Frank fell from grace when he emerged as a forceful critic of the extremes of modern architecture and design d...
Following Italy's unification in 1861, architects, artists, politicians, and literati engaged in volatile debates over the pursuit of national and regional identity. Growing industrialization and urbanization across the country contrasted with the rediscovery of traditionally built forms and objects created by the agrarian peasantry. Pride in Modesty argues that these ordinary, often anonymous, everyday things inspired and transformed Italian art and architecture from the 1920s through the 1970s. Through in-depth examinations of texts, drawings, and buildings, Michelangelo Sabatino finds that the folk traditions of the pre-industrial countryside have provided formal, practical, and poetic inspiration directly affecting both design and construction practices over a period of sixty years and a number of different political regimes. This surprising continuity allows Sabatino to reject the division of Italian history into sharply delimited periods such as Fascist Interwar and Democratic Postwar and to instead emphasize the long, continuous process that transformed pastoral and urban ideals into a new, modernist Italy.
The Viennese café was a key site of urban modernity around 1900. In the rapidly growing city it functioned simultaneously as home and workplace, affording opportunities for both leisure and intellectual exchange. This volume explores the nature and function of the coffeehouse in the social, cultural, and political world of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Just as the café served as a creative meeting place within the city, so this volume initiates conversations between different disciplines focusing on Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century. Contributions are drawn from the fields of social and cultural history, literary studies, Jewish studies and art, and architectural and design history. A fresh perspective is also provided by a selection of comparative articles exploring coffeehouse culture elsewhere in Eastern Europe.