A groundbreaking history of the confluence of regulatory thinking and building design in the United States What is the origin of “room temperature”? When did food become considered fresh or not fresh? Why do we think management makes things more efficient? The answers to these questions share a history with architecture and regulation at the turn of the twentieth century. This pioneering technological and architectural history of environmental control systems during the Gilded Age begins with the premise that regulation—of temperature, the economy, even the freshness of food—can be found in the guts of buildings. From cold storage and scientific laboratories to factories, these infrastructures first organized life in a way we now call “modern.” Drawing on a range of previously unexplored archival resources, Michael Osman examines the increasing role of environmental technologies in building design from the late nineteenth century. He shows how architects appropriated and subsumed the work of engineers as thermostats, air handlers, and refrigeration proliferated. He argues that this change was closely connected to broader cultural and economic trends in management and the regulation of risk. The transformation shaped the evolution of architectural modernism and the development of the building as a machine. Rather than assume the preexisting natural order of things, participants in regulation—including architects, scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, managers, economists, government employees, and domestic reformers—became entangled in managing the errors, crises, and risks stemming from the nation’s unprecedented growth. Modernism’s Visible Hand not only broadens our conception of how industrial capitalism shaped the built environment but is also vital to understanding the role of design in dealing with ecological crises today.

She demonstrates instead that Kahn's architecture is grounded in his deeply held modernist political, social, and artistic ideals, which guided him as he sought to rework modernism into a socially transformative architecture appropriate for the postwar world.".

Invisible Gardens is a composite history of the individuals and firms that defined the field of landscape architecture in America from 1925 to 1975, a period that spawned a significant body of work combining social ideas of enduring value with landscapes and gardens that forged a modern aesthetic. The major protagonists include Thomas Church, Roberto Burle Marx, Isamu Noguchi, Luis Barragan, Daniel Urban Kiley, Stanley White, Hideo Sasaki, Ian McHarg, Lawrence Halprin, and Garrett Eckbo. They were the pioneers of a new profession in America, the first to offer alternatives to the historic landscape and the park tradition, as well as to the suburban sprawl and other unplanned developments of twentieth-century cities and institutions. The work is described against the backdrop of the Great Depression, the Second World War, the postwar recovery, American corporate expansion, and the environmental revolution. The authors look at unbuilt schemes as well as actual gardens, ranging from tiny backyards and play spaces to urban plazas and corporate villas. Some of the projects discussed already occupy a canonical position in modern landscape architecture; others deserve a similar place but are less well known. The result is a record of landscape architecture's cultural contribution - as distinctly different in history, intent, and procedure from its sister fields of architecture and planning - during the years when it was acquiring professional status and struggling to define a modernist aesthetic out of the startling changes in postwar America.

Militant Modernism is a defence against Modernism's many detractors. It looks at design, film and architecture - especially architecture — and pursues the notion of an evolved modernism that simply refuses to stop being necessary. Owen Hatherley gives us new ways to look at what we thought was familiar — Bertolt Brecht, Le Corbusier, even Vladimir Mayakovsky. Through Hatherley's eyes we see all of the quotidian modernists of the 20th century - lesser lights, too — perhaps understanding them for the first time. Whether we are looking at Britain's brutalist aesthetics, Russian Constructivism, or the Sexpol of Wilhelm Reich, the message is clear. There is no alternative to Modernism.

Over the past two decades, scholarship in architectural history has transformed, moving away from design studio pedagogy and postmodern historicism to draw instead from trends in critical theory focusing on gender, race, the environment, and more recently global history, connecting to revisionist trends in other fields. With examples across space and time—from medieval European coin trials and eighteenth-century Haitian revolutionary buildings to Weimar German construction firms and present-day African refugee camps—Writing Architectural History considers the impact of these shifting institutional landscapes and disciplinary positionings for architectural history. Contributors reveal how new methodological approaches have developed interdisciplinary research beyond the traditional boundaries of art history departments and architecture schools, and explore the challenges and opportunities presented by conventional and unorthodox forms of evidence and narrative, the tools used to write history.

A comprehensive survey tracing the course of the Modernist movement.

"Fried put forward a highly original, beholder-centered account of the evolution of a central tradition in French painting from Chardin to Courbet."--P. [4] of cover.

Modern Art and Modernism offers firsthand material for the study of issues central to the development of modern art, its theory, and criticism. The history of modern art is not simply a history of works of art, it is also a history of ideas interpretations. The works of critics and theorists have not merely been influential in deciding how modern art is to be seen and understood, they have also influenced the course it has taken. The nature of modern art cannot be understood without some analysis of the concept of Modernism itself.Modern Art and Modernism presents a selection of texts by the major contributors to debate on this subject, from Baudelaire and Zola in the nineteenth century to Greenberg and T. J. Clark in our own times. It offers a balanced section of essays by contributors to the mainstream of Modernist criticism, representative examples of writing on the themes of abstraction and expression in modern art, and a number of important contributions to the discussion of aesthetics and the social role of the artist. Several of these are made available in English translation for the first time, and others are brought together from a wide range of periodicals and specialized collections.This book will provide an invaluable resource for teachers and students of modern art, art history, and aesthetics, as well as for general readers interested in the place of modern art in culture and history.

This account of modernism and its place in public culture looks at where modernism was produced and how it was transmitted to particular audiences. The individual tales of figures like Joyce, Pound, Marinetti and Eliot provide perspectives on the larger story of modernism itself.

Leading scholars historicize and theorize technology’s role in architectural design Although the question of technics pervades the contemporary discipline of architecture, there are few critical analyses on the topic. Design Technics fills this gap, arguing that the technical dimension of design has often been flattened into the broader celebratory rhetoric of innovation. Bringing together leading scholars in architectural and design history, the volume’s contributors situate these tools on a broader epistemological and chronological canvas. The essays here construct histories—some panoramic and others unfolding around a specific episode—of seven techniques regularly used by the designer in the architectural studio today: rendering, modeling, scanning, equipping, specifying, positioning, and repeating. Starting with observations about the epistemological changes that have unfolded in the discipline in recent decades but seeking to offer a more expansive meaning for technics, the volume casts new light on concepts such as form, experience, and image that have played central roles in historical architectural discourses. Among the questions addressed: How was the concept of form immanent in practices of scanning since the late nineteenth century? What was the historical relationship between rendering and experience in Enlightenment discourses? How did practices of specifying reconfigure the distinction between intellectual and manual labor? What kind of rationality is inherent in the designer’s constant clicking of the mouse in front of her screen? In addressing these and other questions, this engaging and timely collection thereby proposes technics as a site for historical and philosophical reflection not only for those engaged in architectural design but also for any scholar working in the humanities today. Contributors: Lucia Allais, Edward Eigen, Orit Halpern, John Harwood, Matthew C. Hunter, and Michael Osman.