Two Austrian-born designers have left their indelible mark on California?s residential architecture of the 1930s to 1960s: Richard Neutra (1892?1970) and Rudolph M. Schindler (1887?1953) combined modern form and inventive construction with new materials to create a truly modern vision of living that remains inspirational to the present day.00This new book features twenty famous and lesser known houses from that period, designed by the two pioneers and other architects that were influenced by Neutra?s and Schindler?s ideas. All are marked by highly economical use and outstanding quality of space, a minimalist aesthetic, and by their ideal adaption to climatic conditions. They are monuments of a period as well as timeless models for contemporary and future architecture.00The images by photographer David Schreyer show the buildings in their present state as a commodity of highest quality that can be, and should be, altered to meet today?s changed demands to a living space. Andreas Nierhaus?s texts, based on interviews, explore the relationship of the present inhabitants to their homes and what they mean to them. Together, the authors offer uniquely intimate insights into a sophisticated way of life still too little known outside California.

Zukofsky, Oppen, and Niedecker wrote with a diversity of formal strategies but a singularity of purpose: the crafting of an anticapitalist poetics. Inaugurated in 1931 by Louis Zukofsky, Objectivist poetry gave expression to the complex contours of culture and politics in America during the Great Depression. This study of Zukofsky and two others in the Objectivist constellation, George Oppen and Lorine Niedecker, elaborates the dialectic between the formal experimental features of their poetry and their progressive commitments to the radical potentials of modernity. Mixing textual analysis, archival research, and historiography, Ruth Jennison shows how Zukofsky, Oppen, and Niedecker braided their experiences as working-class Jews, political activists, and feminists into radical, canon-challenging poetic forms. Using the tools of critical geography, Jennison offers an account of the relationship between the uneven spatial landscapes of capitalism in crisis and the Objectivists’ paratactical textscapes. In a rethinking of the overall terms in which poetic modernism is described, she identifies and assesses the key characteristics of the Objectivist avant-garde, including its formal recognition of proliferating commodity cultures, its solidarity with global anticapitalist movements, and its imperative to develop poetics that nurtured revolutionary literacy. The resulting narrative is a historically sensitive, thorough, and innovative account of Objectivism’s Depression-era modernism. A rich analysis of American avant-garde poetic forms and politics, The Zukofsky Era convincingly situates Objectivist poetry as a politically radical movement comprising a crucial chapter in American literary history. Scholars and students of modernism will find much to discuss in Jennison’s theoretical study.

Born and raised in Vienna, Richard Neutra (1872 1970) came to America early in his career, settling in California. His influence on post-war architecture is undisputed, the sunny climate and rich landscape being particularly suited to his cool, sleek modern style. Neutra had a keen appreciation for the relationship between people and nature; his trademark plate glass walls and ceilings which turn into deep overhangs have the effect of connecting the indoors with the outdoors. Neutra ability to incorporate technology, aesthetics, science, and nature into his designs him recognition as one of Modernist architecture greatest talents.

Julius Ralph Davidson is widely known as the architect of Thomas Mann’s house. Born 1889 in Berlin, Davidson left Germany in 1923 and emigrated to the USA. In Los Angeles, he designed some 150 projects, among them three houses for the experimental Case Study House Program. This long overdue publication is a comprehensive documentation of Davidson’s life and work, highlighting J.R.’s contribution to modernism in California in the 1930s and 1940s.

Seasons is organized into chapters of poetry coordinated with each season's essence with the purpose of breathing life, inspiration and love with an expressive imagination of thought throughout all seasons featuring Summer: A season sometimes painful and hopeful; issues of loss and love; Fall: Love & it's issues as seen through the eyes of man; Winter: Dealing with love, grieving, hope through a cold season; and finally Spring: beauty in this season of life; God's presence, Grace & Renewal--all in Season.

Reyner Banham (1922–88) was a prolific, iconoclastic critic of modern architecture, cities, and mass culture in Britain and the United States, and his provocative writings are inescapable in these areas. His 1971 book on Los Angeles was groundbreaking in what it told Californians about their own metropolis, and architects about what cities might be if freed from tradition. Banham’s obsession with technology, and his talent for thinking the unthinkable, mean his work still resonates now, more than thirty years after his death. This book explores the full breadth of his career and his legacy, dealing not only with his major books, but a wide range of his journalism and media outputs, as well as the singular character of Banham himself.

Reexamining urban scholarship for the twenty-first century.

Scholars have long described modernism as "heretical" or "iconoclastic" in its assaults on secular traditions of form, genre, and decorum. Yet critics have paid surprisingly little attention to the related category of blasphemy--the rhetoric of religious offense--and to the specific ways this rhetoric operates in, and as, literary modernism. United by a shared commitment to "the word made flesh," writers such as James Joyce, Mina Loy, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Djuna Barnes made blasphemy a key component of their modernist practice, profaning the very scriptures and sacraments that fueled their art. In doing so they belied T. S. Eliot's verdict that the forces of secularization had rendered blasphemy obsolete in an increasingly godless century ("a world in which blasphemy is impossible"); their poems and fictions reveal how forcefully religion endured as a cultural force after the Death of God. More, their transgressions spotlight a politics of religion that has seldom engaged the attention of modernist studies. Blasphemy respects no division of church and state, and neither do the writers who wield it to profane all manner of coercive dogmas--including ecclesiastical as well as more worldly ideologies of race, class, nation, empire, gender, and sexuality. The late-century example of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses affords, finally, a demonstration of how modernism persists in postwar anglophone literature and of the critical role blasphemy plays in that persistence. Blasphemous Modernism thus resonates with the broader cultural and ideological concerns that in recent years have enriched the scope of modernist scholarship.

Housing Problems provides fresh readings of major writers, Goethe, Walpole, Freud, Heidegger, Poe, H.D., and Oppen, by bringing together the fields of literature, philosophy and architecture.

This collection brings fresh perspectives to bear upon key questions surrounding the composition, performance and reception of musical modernism.