Modern Architecture

Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) President's Medal Award (multi-media representation of architecture). Canada's most distinguished architectural critics and scholars offer fresh insights into the country's unique modern and contemporary architecture. Beginning with the nation's centennial and Expo 67 in Montreal, this fifty-year retrospective covers the defining of national institutions and movements: • How Canadian architects interpreted major external trends • Regional and indigenous architectural tendencies • The influence of architects in Canada's three largest cities: Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver Co-published with Canadian Architect, this comprehensive reference book is extensively illustrated and includes fifteen specially commissioned essays.

This new account of international modernism explores the complex motivations behind this revolutionary movement and assesses its triumphs and failures. The work of the main architects of the movement such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe is re-examined shedding new light on their roles as acknowledged masters. Alan Colquhoun explores the evolution of the movement fron Art Nouveau in the 1890s to the megastructures of the 1960s, revealing the often contradictory demands of form, function, social engagement, modernity and tradition.

In over 220 drawings and photographs, Robert Mellin presents the development of architecture in the decades immediately following Newfoundland's 1949 union with Canada. Newfoundland's wholehearted embrace of modern architecture in this era affected planning as well as the design of cultural facilities, commercial and public buildings, housing, recreation, educational facilities, and places of worship, and Premier Joseph Smallwood often relied on modern architecture to demonstrate the progress made by his administration. Mellin explores the links between Smallwood and modern architecture, revealing how Smallwood guided the development of numerous architectural projects. He also looks at the work of two innovative local architects, Frederick A. Colbourne and Angus J. Campbell, showing how their architecture was influenced by their life-long interest in art. The first comprehensive work on an important period of architectural development in urban and rural Newfoundland, Newfoundland Modern complements Mellin's award-winning book on the outport of Tilting, Fogo Island.

How climate influenced the design strategies of modernist architects Modern Architecture and Climate explores how leading architects of the twentieth century incorporated climate-mediating strategies into their designs, and shows how regional approaches to climate adaptability were essential to the development of modern architecture. Focusing on the period surrounding World War II—before fossil-fuel powered air-conditioning became widely available—Daniel Barber brings to light a vibrant and dynamic architectural discussion involving design, materials, and shading systems as means of interior climate control. He looks at projects by well-known architects such as Richard Neutra, Le Corbusier, Lúcio Costa, Mies van der Rohe, and Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and the work of climate-focused architects such as MMM Roberto, Olgyay and Olgyay, and Cliff May. Drawing on the editorial projects of James Marston Fitch, Elizabeth Gordon, and others, he demonstrates how images and diagrams produced by architects helped conceptualize climate knowledge, alongside the work of meteorologists, physicists, engineers, and social scientists. Barber describes how this novel type of environmental media catalyzed new ways of thinking about climate and architectural design. Extensively illustrated with archival material, Modern Architecture and Climate provides global perspectives on modern architecture and its evolving relationship with a changing climate, showcasing designs from Latin America, Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and Africa. This timely and important book reconciles the cultural dynamism of architecture with the material realities of ever-increasing carbon emissions from the mechanical cooling systems of buildings, and offers a historical foundation for today’s zero-carbon design.

The importance of protecting significant buildings from decay and destruction would seem to be undeniable. Yet whilst the majority of buildings of merit constructed before the Second World War have been highlighted as worthy of protection there is much indifference, and in some cases hostility towards many important post-war buildings. These deserve to receive wider formal recognition but in many cases continue to be mistreated or even demolished.This book examines many of the philosophical and practical issues surrounding the conservation of modern buildings and also the problems faced by building practitioners in dealing with buildings constructed in a wider range of styles and materials than at any other time. Climate change in particular has forced change in the way in which we think about buildings, with the pressures to address issues of energy efficiency becoming more urgent and likely to have consequences that may alter the perceived architectural and historic interest of modern and traditional buildings alike.

Vincent Scully has shaped not only how we view the evolution of architecture in the twentieth century but also the course of that evolution itself. Combining the modes of historian and critic in unique and compelling ways--with an audience that reaches from students and scholars to professional architects and ardent amateurs--Scully has profoundly influenced the way architecture is thought about and made. This extensively illustrated and elegantly designed volume distills Scully's incalculable contribution. Neil Levine, a former student of Scully's, selects twenty essays that reveal the breadth and depth of Scully's work from the 1950s through the 1990s. The pieces are included for their singular contribution to our understanding of modern architecture as well as their relative unavailability to current readers. Levine offers a perceptive overview of Scully's distinguished career and introduces each essay, skillfully setting the scholarly and cultural scene. The selections address almost all of modern architecture's major themes and together go a long way toward defining what constitutes the contemporary experience of architecture and urbanism. Each is characteristically Scully--provocative, yet precise in detail and observation, written with passionate clarity. They document Scully's seminal views on the relationship between the natural and the built environment and trace his progressively intense concern with the fabric of the street and of our communities. The essays also highlight Scully's engagement with the careers of so many of the twentieth century's most significant architects, from Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn to Robert Venturi. In the tradition of great intellectual biographies, this finely made book chronicles our most influential architectural historian and critic. It is a gift to architecture and its history.

Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture revolutionized the understanding of modernism in architecture, pushing back the sense of its origin from the early twentieth century to the 1750s and thus placing architectural thought within the a broader context of Western intellectual history. This new edition of Peter Collins's ground-breaking study includes all seventy-two illustrations of the original hard cover edition, which has been out of print since 1967, and restores the large format.

Covering the period 1890 - 1932 this book focuses on various recognised masters explaining the detailing and construction techniques used in their buildings.