Art museums, cases of beauty and calm in a fast-paced world, have emerged in recent decades as the most vibrant and popular of all cultural institutions. But as they have become more popular, their direction and values have been contested as never before. This engaging thematic history of the art museum from its inception in the eighteenth century to the present offers an essential framework for understanding contemporary debates as they have evolved in Europe and the United States.

Jean-Jacques Lequeu does in fact hide behind the most enigmatic and controversial smile in the history of art, writes Philippe Duboy in a book that is one of the most tantalizing examples of architectural investigation ever produced. It is an extraordinary compilation - part speculative biography, part meticulous research, with hundreds of intriguing drawings, many in color - that unravels the mystery of this eighteenth-century maverick artist whose drawings have established him variously as a visionary architect associated with Boullee and Ledoux, forerunner of surrealism, and inventor of bad taste. Lequeu's architectural drawings from the legendary portfolios Architecture civile and Nouvelle methode are presented here in their entirety, along with his Lewd Figures, perhaps the oddest feature of the whole collection. The drawings are accompanied by long captions, misspelt and ungrammatical, but written in a flawless bureaucratic hand. The artist's marginalia provide insights into his visions, which seem dominated by an obsession with petrified forms and a recurring preoccupation with sex. Interleaved with the drawings are curious autobiographical papers. And it is here that Duboy's investigation of Lequeu begins to reveal strange clues. He discovers that Lequeu was not an architect at all but a government bureaucrat, a draftsman who ended up living in a brothel. Between the brothel and the obscure office from which he was eventually fired, he produced his encyclopedia of the universe - bizarre portraits of nuns baring their breasts and other lewd figures, and architectural fantasies of vast imaginary cities. Duboy takes his study further, into the realm of Charles Fourier andhis brother-in-law Anthelme Brillat-Savarin and from there to the world of the dadaists, surrealists, and futurists, particularly the circles of Marcel Duchamp and Le Corbusier. He suggests that Duchamp and Raymond Rousell tampered with the Lequeu drawings to concoct a character and oeuvre even more puzzling. There are glimpses of Duchamp's convolutions of mind that will stir a reassessment of his work. Duchamp emerges here, for the first time, as an intrepid and unwavering despiser of Le Corbusier. Twentieth-century reputations are as much at stake in this study as those of the eighteenth-century artist, notes Robin Middleton. Philippe Duboy is Professor of the History of Cities, Paris-Belleville School of Architecture.

A skyscraper one mile high, a dome covering most of downtown Manhattan, a triumphal arch in the form of an elephant: some of the most exciting buildings in the history of architecture are the ones that never got built. These are the projects in which architects took materials to the limits, explored challenging new ideas, defied conventions, and pointed the way towards the future. Some of them are architectural masterpieces, some simply delightful flights of fancy. It was not usually poor design that stymied them – politics, inadequate funding, or a client who chose a ‘safe’ option rather than a daring vision were all things that could stop a project leaving the drawing board. These unbuilt buildings include the grand projects that acted as architectural calling cards, experimental designs that stretch technology, visions for the future of the city, and articles of architectural faith. Structures likeBuckminster Fuller’s dome over New York or Frank Lloyd Wright’s mile-high tower can seem impossibly daring. But they also point to buildings that came decades later, to the Eden Project and the Shard. Some of those unbuilt wonders are buildings of great beauty and individual form like Etienne-Louis Boullée’s enormous spherical monument to Isaac Newton; some, such as the city plans of Le Corbusier, seem to want to teach us how to live; some, like El Lissitsky’s ‘horizontal skyscrapers’ and Gaudí’s curvaceous New York hotel, turn architectural convention upside-down; some, such as Archigram’s Walking City and Plug-in City, are bizarre and inspiring by turns. All are captured in this magnificently illustrated book.

Featuring 75 of the world's most influential architects, this book presents the story of 20th-century architecture through the fascinating personal stories and significant works that have shaped the field. Arranged in a broadly chronological order, the book gives the reader a sense of the impact that inventive individuals have had on the development of architecture and our built environment. Key dates in the architects' careers are listed in timeline features, thereby allowing the author freedom to move beyond well-known biographies to analyze the buildings and map out the exciting visions behind them. With insightful text describing carefully selected examples, this is a dynamic and unique guide to the architects whose visions have created the buildings around us.

This series offers a range of heretofore unavailable writings in English translation on the subjects of art, architecture, and aesthetics. Camus's description of the French hotel argues that architecture should please the senses and the mind.

Condemned Building is one of our most requested out-of-print books, so we've done a special limited edition reprint (only 750 copies) to meet the ongoing demand for this book. Not long after this book was published, the only one on the work of this gifted architect and delineator, Doug died of leukemia. Fans and friends, including legions of students, quickly bought up the remaining copies, and the difficulty of finding this book has undoubtedly only increased its appeal. Doug said that these projects were "the underbelly of canonical architectural principles and forms", and indeed many are dark, brooding, or sexual in nature: a "kamasutra with the negative." The book covers ten projects, in model, drawing, and "psychoanalytical" text. Douglas Darden taught at Harvard, Columbia, and most recently the University of Colorado at Denver. He was a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. He is sorely missed, but we're happy to be able to offer his book once again.

Aldo Rossi (1931 97) is a key figure in 20th-century architecture. Often described as melancholic, his work was and still is influential both in architectural theory and practice. This new book discusses this notion of melancholy and its role on the example of Rossi. Drawing on rich archival sources, the author investigates several aspects of the Italian architect s figure and analyzes one of his landmark works, the Cemetery of San Cataldo in Modena, Italy. He also looks at the current issues of stardom, overexposure, and commercialization which Rossi anticipated, debating them in relation to melancholy. The history of melancholy as a companion to culture tells equally of affliction and an inspiration. Its meaning has always oscillated between medical statement and a mark of dignity. Subject and object, the individual and the collective have surrendered to the condition s allurement. While the influence of melancholy on visual arts and literature has been extensively debated, its presence in architecture has been overlooked so far. Yet artist and poets, such as Albrecht Durer (1471 1528) or Charles Baudelaire (1821 67), have related melancholy to questions of space, city, and modernity. Also, architects like Etienne-Louis Boullee (1728 99) or Adolf Loos (1870 1933) noted sentiments of gloom or crisis in their writings. Likewise, Aldo Rossi can be discussed from a similar standpoint. Amidst great social changes after WW II, he disputed the modernists credos and questioned the status of his profession. Discarding utopian pretences, his work claimed the autonomy of architecture with formal restraint. These positions and his understanding of terms like fragment and memory imply melancholy. His buildings, drawings, and writings oscillate between enthusiasm and disenchantment. The Cemetery of San Cataldo (1971 84) is an example of the latter. Closely intertwined with Rossi s biography, its stark and monumental buildings reinterpret a typology from the past to come to terms with the representations of death and its inevitable melancholy. "

Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand (1760–1834) regarded the Précis of the Lectures on Architecture (1802–5) and its companion volume, the Graphic Portion (1821), as both a basic course for future civil engineers and a treatise. Focusing the practice of architecture on utilitarian and economic values, he assailed the rationale behind classical architectural training: beauty, proportionality, and symbolism. His formal systematization of plans, elevations, and sections transformed architectural design into a selective modular typology in which symmetry and simple geometrical forms prevailed. His emphasis on pragmatic values, to the exclusion of metaphysical concerns, represented architecture as a closed system that subjected its own formal language to logical processes. Now published in English for the first time, the Précis and the Graphic Portion are classics of architectural education.

From 1978 to 1993, the renowned Soviet "paper architects" Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin created an incredible collection of elaborate etchings depicting outlandish, often impossible, buildings and cityscapes. Funny, cerebral, and deeply human, their obsessively detailed work layers elements borrowed from Egyptian tombs, Ledoux's visionary architecture, Le Corbusier's urban master plans, and other historical precedents in etchings of breathtaking complexity and beauty. Back by popular demand following the sold-out original 1991 edition and 2003 reprint, Brodsky & Utkin presents the sum of the architects' collaborative prints and adds new material, including an updated preface by the artists' gallery representative, Ron Feldman, a new introductory essay by architect Aleksandr Mergold, visual documentation of the duo's installation work, and rare personal photographs.