Symbolic Essence And Other Writings On Modern Architecture And American Culture

"Historian and architectural critic William H. Jordy (1917-1997) significantly shaped the way we understand the character and meaning of modern architecture and American culture. This collection of his thought-provoking essays encompasses Jordy's entire career and includes his signature essay, "The Symbolic Essence of Modern Architecture of the Twenties and Its Continuing Influence." The collection also contains critical writings on works by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, and Robert Venturi, as well as less well-known pieces and one previously unpublished text."--BOOK JACKET.

"Historian and architectural critic William H. Jordy (1917-1997) significantly shaped the way we understand the character and meaning of modern architecture and American culture. This collection of his thought-provoking essays encompasses Jordy's entire career and includes his signature essay, 'The Symbolic Essence of Modern Architecture of the Twenties and Its Continuing Influence.' The collection also contains critical writings on works by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, and Robert Venturi, as well as less well-known pieces and one previously unpublished text. Generously illustrated, the book demonstrates the range and depth of Jordy's thinking. He leads his readers to discover important connections of architecture with art, literature, intellectual history, symbolic structures, social purpose, and community. Mardges Bacon's insightful introduction to the volume situates Jordy's essays in historical and architectural context and offers a concise intellectual biography of this original and influential thinker"--Publisher's description.

'The Symbolic Essence of Modern European Architecture of the Twenties and Its Continuing Influence'), this collection contains critical writings on works by Mies, Corbusier, Kahn, and Venturi, as well as one previously unpublished text. Jordy leads readers to discover important connections of architecture with art, literature, intellectual history, symbolic structures, social purpose and community. He significantly shaped the way we understand the character and meaning of modern architecture and American culture.

Arranged in alphabetical order, these 5 volumes encompass the history of the cultural development of America with over 2300 entries.

John McAndrew's Modernist Vision tells the compelling story of the architect, scholar, and curator John McAndrew, who played a key role in redefining modernism in the United States from the 1930s onward. The designer of the Vassar College Art Library—arguably the first modern interior on a college campus—and the curator of architecture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1937 to 1941, McAndrew was instrumental in creating a distinct and innovative aesthetic that bridged the European modernist lineage and American regional vernacular. Providing a fascinating glimpse into McAndrew's life, his associations with important architects and artists, and the historical context that shaped his work, this book is a thoroughly researched testament to a man who left a powerful mark on the evolution of American architecture.

In this rapidly globalizing world, any investigation of architecture inevitably leads to considerations of regionalism. But despite its omnipresence in contemporary practice and theory, architectural regionalism remains a fluid concept, its historical development and current influence largely undocumented. This comprehensive reader brings together over 40 key essays illustrating the full range of ideas embodied by the term. Authored by important critics, historians, and architects such as Kenneth Frampton, Lewis Mumford, Sigfried Giedion, and Alan Colquhoun, Architectural Regionalism represents the history of regionalist thinking in architecture from the early twentieth century to today.

Gwendolyn Wright’s USA is an engaging account the evolution of American architecture, from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first.

Winner, 2021 CAAA Charles Rufus Morey Book Award Winner, 2021 On the Brinck Book Award Shortlist, 2020 MSA First Book Prize In the nineteenth-century paradigm of architectural organicism, the notion that buildings possessed character provided architects with a lens for relating the buildings they designed to the populations they served. Advances in scientific race theory enabled designers to think of “race” and “style” as manifestations of natural law: just as biological processes seemed to inherently regulate the racial characters that made humans a perfect fit for their geographical contexts, architectural characters became a rational product of design. Parallels between racial and architectural characters provided a rationalist model of design that fashioned some of the most influential national building styles of the past, from the pioneering concepts of French structural rationalism and German tectonic theory to the nationalist associations of the Chicago Style, the Prairie Style, and the International Style. In Building Character, Charles Davis traces the racial charge of the architectural writings of five modern theorists—Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Gottfried Semper, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and William Lescaze—to highlight the social, political, and historical significance of the spatial, structural, and ornamental elements of modern architectural styles.