Product Description

Assessing the masters of modern architecture, this volume includes such figures as Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Philip Johnson, Frank Lloyd Wright and Alvar Aalto. The text takes a critical look at the development of urban centres around the world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2096519 in Books
• Published on: 1998-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

From Library Journal
These titles are part of the new 40-volume "World Architecture" series to be completed over the next five years. Each volume covers a country or period; chief features of the series are the fine illustrations and the clear, concise texts that cover the material in style. A very good value, the books are printed in a large format with many illustrations in sumptuous color, even the maps and plans. Stierlin is best known for his 16-volume Architecture Universelle, published between 1964 and 1972. His text, together with his wife's photographs, brings alive the world of Turkish architecture, centered on the great architect Sinan (1489-1588). Kahn (architecture, MIT) gives a balanced survey of the dominant new styles of 20th-century architecture up to the advent of Postmodernism. For all architecture collections.APeter S. Kaufman, Boston Architectural Ctr.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
Philip Jodidio studied art history and economics at Harvard University, and was editor-in-chief of the leading French art journal Connaissance des Arts for over two decades. He has published numerous articles and books on contemporary architecture, including TASCHEN's Architecture Now! series, Building a New Millennium, and monographs Tadao Ando, Santiago Calatrava, Norman Foster, Richard Meier, Jean Nouvel, and Alvaro Siza. Hasan-Uddin Khan studied at the Architectural Association in London and subsequently worked as a freelance architect in London and Karachi. Since 1994 he has been Visiting Professor of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of numerous articles and books.

Customer Reviews

Discovering the International Style
ARCHITECTURE IS A VISUAL MEDIUM! This book lets you see it for yourself!

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, finding the text helpful and the photographs really clear and explanatory. The book is aimed at an interested general reader or to the student of architecture, and discusses the subject with enough reference to antecedents to give a grounding, but also lets the subject "speak". The author gently guides the reader by well-chosen example, rather than by telling him or her what to think.

Although many of the early buildings presented are well-known, they are also very well-presented, and the (mostly color) photographs are really stunning. Going further, the attention that Hasan-Uddin Khan pays to building examples from the Third World should be of keen interest to students of those areas -- it could be the subject of a further book in itself.

The comprehensible layout of the chapters and topics aids the reader in following the development of this style of architecture, and the photo captions often give new information, not just a repetition of the text. Last but not least, the brilliant Bauhaus palette of colors used in the endpapers, chapter divisions and dust jacket serve to enhance the reader's pleasure. This is not an expensive book -- very good value -- and would be a useful and enjoyable addition to anyone's library.

CLEAR TEXT & FASCINATING IMAGES
A vivid portrayal of a certain consciousness manifesting itself into films (Lang's Metropolis), paintings, and above all, stunning buildings throughout the world. Mr. Khan delivers this story in clear text and fascinating images.
Having visited many modernist buildings while living and working in many cities abroad, I feel fortunate to have this book activate my memories into a deeper understanding.
The hard cover stays in my collection while the paperback makes many a smart gift.

Modern Architecture's Official History
Almost 70 years after Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson invented the so-called "International Style" to describe the varied avant-garde architecture of Europe and the United States, authors like Hasan-Uddin Khan still regard the term as truth instead of the fiction that it is. This book claims that the architects included in the Museum of Modern Art's 1932 exhibition were working with a "global" approach and "international" outlook, disregarding historical evidence that shows a variety of different social, functional, and formal interests were being pursued by different architects in different locales. The author's approach is reductive and essentializing; he treats architectural history as a series of "isms," and deliberately excludes architects who do not fall under conventional definitions of "modern" architects.

Though he begins the narrative by claiming the international style as "marked by an optimistic belief that the new technologies of industrialization . . . would produce a qualitatively better world," and he describes Hitchcock and Johnson's definition as being based entirely on formal descriptions of the buildings, the author fails to question this transition from the progressive social and functional concerns of the 1920s to a reactionary definition that erased all social meaning and goals of the architects in question. The author also fails to question the arbitrariness of Hitchcock and Johnson's selections.

The photographs are excellent; it makes a nice coffee-table book.