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Antoni Gaudí
When the Corbusian International Modern style, with its contempt for ornament, imposed itself on architecture, figures like Gaudi (1852-1926) were relegated to the sidelines. In this volume, Lahuerta situates Gaudi in his context and vindicates his fin-de-siecle bohemian modernity. Embodied in such powerful images as the equation of the spires of the Sagrada Familia with the flames rising from burning churches during the Tragic Week (1909), the story takes us to the Barcelona of the early twentieth century, when class struggle threatened to topple the prevailing capitalist model. Drawing on valuable first-hand documents collected over several decades, the author shows that Gaudi was not an i...
Georgii Krutikov
Georgii Krutikov epitomises the utopian visions and aspirations of the Russian Avant-garde. In 1927, while still an architectural student at the Moscow Vkhutemas, he presented his vision for a flying city. It was a scheme that was intended to solve the problem of over-crowding and despoiling of the Earth s surface and resources, by placing humanity s living quarters in space. Inspired by dreams of space travel, notions of building a new world, and a revolutionary idealism which seemed to make all things possible, Krutikov developed his ideas in great detail, producing a substantial amount of data, along with numerous sketches, drawings, and plans. For decades, architectural historians of Rus...
Architecture and Abstraction
A landmark study of abstraction in architectural history, theory, and practice that challenges our assumptions about the meaning of abstract forms. In this theoretical study of abstraction in architecture—the first of its kind—Pier Vittorio Aureli argues for a reconsideration of abstraction, its meanings, and its sources. Although architects have typically interpreted abstraction in formal terms—the purposeful reduction of the complexities of design to its essentials—Aureli shows that abstraction instead arises from the material conditions of building production. In a lively study informed by Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, and other social theorists, this book presen...
Lumen Naturae
Exploring common themes in modern art, mathematics, and science, including the concept of space, the notion of randomness, and the shape of the cosmos. This is a book about art—and a book about mathematics and physics. In Lumen Naturae (the title refers to a purely immanent, non-supernatural form of enlightenment), mathematical physicist Matilde Marcolli explores common themes in modern art and modern science—the concept of space, the notion of randomness, the shape of the cosmos, and other puzzles of the universe—while mapping convergences with the work of such artists as Paul Cezanne, Mark Rothko, Sol LeWitt, and Lee Krasner. Her account, focusing on questions she has investigated in...
Alexander Bogdanov and the Politics of Knowledge after the October Revolution
In this book, Maria Chehonadskih unsettles established narratives about the formation of a revolutionary canon after the October Revolution. Displacing the centre of gravity from dialectical materialism to the rapid dissemination, canonisation and decline of a striking convergence of empiricism and Marxism, she explores how this tendency, overshadowed by official historiography, establishes a new attitude to modernity and progress, nature and environment, agency and subjectivity, party and class, knowledge and power. The book traces the adventure of the synthesis of empiricism and Marxism across philosophy, science, politics, art and literature from the 1890s to the 1930s, offering a radical rethinking of the true scope and scale that the main proponent of Empirio-Marxism, Alexander Bogdanov, had on the post-revolutionary socialist legacies. Chehonadskih draws on both key and forgotten figures and movements, such as Proletkult, Productivism and Constructivism, filling a gap in the literature that will be particularly significant for Marxism, continental philosophy, art theory and Slavic studies specialists.
Constructivism
"Aleksei Gan's "Constructivism" was the first theoretical treatise of post-revolutionary Russia's emergent Constructivist movement. Published in 1922, this iconoclastic blast of revolutionary zeal was a declaration of war on traditional Bourgeois art. By defining its three core principles: tectonics, faktura & construction, Gan recasts artist and architect as Constructors, no longer fretting about aesthetic or speculative problems in art but focusing instead on the fusion of art with everyday life to create a system of design where "everything will be conceived in a technical and functional way" - a fitting contribution to the great task of building the new communist society ... Gan, the "Mass Constructor", was a key figure among Russia's post-revolutionary avant-garde, working across theatre, architecture, graphics and cinema. Agitator, publisher, activist and promoter, he was a close friend of Rodchenko and Stepanova and was the foremost theoretician of Moscow's Working Group of Constructivists"--Page [4] of cover.
On Loos, Ornament and Crime
"On Loos, Ornament and Crime"is the most controversial of the essays in the series entitled "Columns of Smoke," in which Professor Juan Jose Lahuerta undertakes an acute and thoroughly documented rereading of modernity, linking the ideas of architecture and ornamentation and exploring the ways these have been treated in print. In the previous volume of this series Lahuerta exploded cliches with his penetrating analysis of Loos's relationship with photography, and here he examines in fine detail the architect's written work, and in particular the texts that engage with architectural and artistic theory and continue the classical tradition of Schinkel, Semper and Riegl an allegiance readily ap...
Photography Or Life
In "Photography or Life," Juan José Lahuerta contrasts well-known images tied to the history of twentieth-century architecture with anonymous graphic materials and pictures from the popular press. In doing so, he demonstrates that pointing a camera at a building is neither natural nor innocent-it involves deliberate and telling decisions. His analysis of the work of Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, for example, suggests irreconcilable differences between the two architects that represent radically opposed approaches to architecture and life. Furthermore, a close study of snapshots of Walter Gropius's Bauhaus building taken by teachers and students leads to new ways of understanding the myths as...
Legible - Visible
Legible-Visible explores the relationship between print publications and audio-visual documents, two of the most important media in the social and cultural landscape of our time--and two forms that also define the evolution of contemporary art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Mela Dávila and Maite Muñoz here show how the arrival of inexpensive home video technologies in the 1970s and then of digital media at the turn of the millennium sparked revolutions in the creation and diffusion of both video artworks and artists' publications. Dávila proposes a theoretical and historical framework for works long dismissed by the market because of their serial nature, while Muñoz shows how artists have taken advantage of the permeability between publications and audovisual elements. The first book-length work to study artists' publications and video in relation to each other, Legible-Visible will enable new ways of thinking about a number of contemporary artists and their work.
Joseph Beuys Manresa
The first performances by Joseph Beuys were a radical turning point for twentieth-century art. Beuys saw art as a transformative action that is both personal and communal, and his expanded artistic practice engaged spirituality, personal mythology, political structures, and symbolic materials. For Manresa, one of his legendary performance actions, which took place on December 15, 1966 in Düsseldorf, he collaborated with the Danish artists Henning Christiansen and Björn Nörgaard. In 1994 those two artists performed a new version of the piece as Manresa Hauptbahnhof. The performance was carried out in Manresa, the city that both gave the name to the original action and also was where Saint ...
