From humble prefabs to Sheffield’s colossal Park Hill, the number of English buildings listed for their special architectural and historical interest is staggering. All of them appear here, with 350 color photos, right from the very first post-war residence listed: Sir Albert Richardson’s Bracken House. Every region in England is covered, with London divided into 3 areas. The buildings range from traditional works to internationally outstanding modern structures. “[An] excellent introduction...a punchy little book.”—Urban Design.
This book is the first informed overview of the restoration Venice has undergone in the last two hundred years, from the Austrian occupation to today. A great deal changed after the Fall of the Republic in 1797; how much is not realized by its visitors. Readers of this book will never look upon Venice’s streets, houses, and canals in the same way again. This book is a sobering, informative, critical history, both sympathetically and caustically explaining the viewpoint of the nineteenth-century restorers and illustrating to devastating effect how the same mentality continues to this day. One special virtue of the book is to explain to English-language readers what would otherwise be the impenetrable secrets of modern Italian building legislation and practice. It is essential reading for those concerned with conservation worldwide, but also for lovers of the city who would like to gain a better idea of the reality of the numerous works of "extraordinary maintenance" to which the city continues to be subject.
"A" was the architectural letterform of leisure building in postwar America. Eager to stake out mountain and lakeside retreats, an entire generation of high-end homebuilders and weekend handymen found the A-frame an easy and affordable home to construct; its steeply sloping triangular roof distinctive and easy to maintain )almost no exterior walls to paint!). Fueled by A-frame plans and kits, the style became something of a national craze, with tens of thousands of houses built. Indeed, the A-frame was an icon for recreation, and acceptable form of modernism (although its origins go back thousands of years), and a convenient tool for marketing a wide range of products, including gas-powered toilets, motorcycles, and canned vegetables; Fisher-Price even made one for children. So popular on the domestic front, the A-frame was eventually adapted to other building types, from roadside restaurants to churches. In a fascinating look at this architectural phenomenon, Chad Randl tells the story of the "triangle" house from prehistoric Japan to its lifestyle-changing heyday in the 1960s. Part architectural history and part cultural exploration, A-Frame documents every aspect of A-frame living using cartoons, ads, high-style and do-it-yourself examples, family snapshots, and even an appendix with a complete set of blueprints in case you want to build your own!
Munich, notorious in recent history as the capital of the Nazi movement, is the site of Gavriel Rosenfeld's stimulating inquiry into the German collective memory of the Third Reich. Rosenfeld shows, with the aid of a wealth of photographs, how the city's urban form developed after 1945 in direct reflection of its inhabitants' evolving memory of the Second World War and the Nazi dictatorship. In the second half of the twentieth century, the German people's struggle to come to terms with the legacy of Nazism has dramatically shaped nearly all dimensions of their political, social, and cultural life. The area of urban development and the built environment, little explored until now, offers visible evidence of the struggle. By examining the ways in which the people of Munich reconstructed the ruins of their historic buildings, created new works of architecture, dealt with surviving Nazi buildings, and erected new monuments to commemorate the horrors of the recent past, Rosenfeld identifies a spectrum of competing memories of the Nazi experience.
Foreword by Pari Stave The French Riviera has been a fabled resort for more than a century. As an enclave for the rich and famous, as well as a scenic tourist spot, it represents all that is beautiful and amusing. But for many of the twentieth century's finest painters, sculptors, photographers, and architects it has been much more: a place of potent myth and extraordinary creativity. Picasso, Matisse, Beckmann, Brancusi, Lartigue, Le Corbusier, and Eileen Gray, among many others, were inspired to create some of their greatest work on the Côte d'Azur. This study examines the impact of modernity and the artistic imagination on an idyllic landscape. Touching on the issues of pleasure and escape, work and leisure, and desire and ecstasy, Making Paradise offers a fresh look at the Côte d'Azur and its historical significance as a site for modernist innovation from 1890 to the present. Beginning with the neoimpressionists, moving to the Fauves, and ending with such contemporary artists as David Hockney and Faith Ringgold, the book examines the splendid light and terrain of the southeastern coast of France and the region's influence on the artists who worked and played there. Like the book, the exhibition it accompanies features unexpected juxtapostitions: masterworks by Bonnard and Picasso with the photographs of Lartigue and Model; the villas of Le Corbusier, Gray, and Mallet-Stevens with designs for the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo; and ceramics of Picasso with the found-object constructions of the Ecole de Nice of the early 1960s. Copublished with the AXA Gallery, New York. Exhibition information: AXA Gallery New York, New York April 26-July 14, 2001
(1)The pioneering project that sought to bring modernism to the masses... The Case Study House program (1945–1966) was an exceptional, innovative event in the history of American architecture and remains to this day unique. The program, which concentrated on the Los Angeles area and oversaw the design of 36 prototype homes, sought to make available plans for modern residences that could be easily and cheaply constructed during the postwar building boom. Highly experimental, the program generated houses that were designed to redefine the modern home, and thus had a pronounced influence on architecture—American and international—both during the program’s existence and even to this day. This compact guide includes all projects featured in our XL version, with over 150 photos and plans and a map of where all houses are (or were) located.
When Mary Mackie¹s husband became Houseman at Felbrigg Hall, one of the stately homes of Britain¹s National Trust, she suddenly found herself Assistant Drain-Clearer, Doorbell-Answerer, Flower Arranger, and Rodent Exterminator. But leavening all the hard work were the exciting discoveries and the certainty that life would never be dull again.
