The extraordinary life and work of architect Amaza Lee Meredith, and the role modernism and material culture played in the aspiring Black American middle class of the early twentieth century. Amaza Lee Meredith Imagines Herself Modern tells the captivating story of Amaza Lee Meredith, a Black woman architect, artist, and educator born into the Jim Crow South, whose bold choices in both life and architecture expand our understanding of the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance, while revealing the importance of architecture as a force in Black middle-class identity. Through her charismatic protagonist, Jacqueline Taylor derives new insights into the experiences of Black women at the forefront of culture in early twentieth-century America, caught between expectation and ambition, responsibility and desire. Central to Taylor’s argument is that Meredith’s response to modern architecture and art, like those of other Black cultural producers, was not marginal to the modernist project; instead, her work reveals the tensions and inconsistencies in how American modernism has been defined. In this way, the book shines a necessary light on modernism’s complexity, while overturning perceived notions of race and gender in relation to the modernist project and challenging the notion of the white male hero of modern architecture.

"The first comprehensive history of the role of women architects within the history of American modernism"--

An exploration of twentieth-century conceptions of time and their relation to artistic form. In Architectures of Time, Sanford Kwinter offers a critical guide to the modern history of time and to the interplay between the physical sciences and the arts. Tracing the transformation of twentieth-century epistemology to the rise of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, Kwinter explains how the demise of the concept of absolute time, and of the classical notion of space as a fixed background against which things occur, led to field theory and a physics of the "event." He suggests that the closed, controlled, and mechanical world of physics gave way to the approximate, active, and qualitative world of biology as a model of both scientific and metaphysical explanation. Kwinter examines theory of time and space in Einstein's theories of relativity and shows how these ideas were reflected in the writings of the sculptor Umberto Boccioni, the town planning schema of the Futurist architect Antonio Sant'Elia, the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and the writings of Franz Kafka. He argues that the writings of Boccioni and the visionary architecture of Sant'Elia represent the earliest and most profound deployments of the concepts of field and event. In discussing Kafka's work, he moves away from the thermodynamic model in favor of the closely related one of Bergsonian duree, or virtuality. He argues that Kafka's work manifests a coherent cosmology that can be understood only in relation to the constant temporal flux that underlies it.

Le Corbusier's assistant and fellow architect remembers his mentor in a series of concise and poetic reflections. Le Corbusier's Hands offers a poetic and personal portrait of Le Corbusier—a nuanced portrayal that is in contrast to the popular image of Le Corbusier the aloof modernist. The author knew Le Corbusier intimately for thirty years, first as his draftsman and main assistant, later as his colleague and personal friend. In this book, written in the mid-1980s, Wogenscky remembers his mentor in a series of revealing personal statements and evocative reflections unlike anything that exists in the vast literature on Le Corbusier. Wogenscky draws a portrait in swift, deft strokes—50 short chapters, one leading to the next, one memory of Le Corbusier opening into another. Appearing and reappearing like a leitmotif are Le Corbusier's hands—touching, taking, drawing, offering, closing, opening, grasping, releasing: "It was his hands that revealed him.... They spoke all his feelings, all the vibrations of his inner life that his face tried to conceal." Wogenscky writes about Le Corbusier's work, including the famous design of the chapel at Ronchamp, his ideas for high-density Unités d'Habitation linked to the center of a "Radiant City," and his "Modulor" system for defining proportions—which Wogenscky compares to a piano tuner's finding the exact relation between sounds. He remembers the day Picasso spent with Le Corbusier at the Marseilles building site—"All day long they outdid one another in a show of modesty," he observes in amazement. He adds, speaking for himself and the others present, "We were inside a double energy field." And Wogenscky writes about Le Corbusier more personally. "I have spent years trying to understand what went on in his mind and in his hand," he tells us. With Le Corbusier's Hands, Wogenscky gives us a unique record of an enigmatic genius.

Unavailable as a collection until now, these essays document both the intellectual journey of one of the world's leading architects and a critical period in the evolution of architectural thought. Born in Tokyo, educated in Japan and the United States, and principal of an internationally acclaimed architectural practice, celebrated architect Fumihiko Maki brings to his writings on architecture a perspective that is both global and uniquely Japanese. Influenced by post-Bauhaus internationalism, sympathetic to the radical urban architectural vision of Team X, and a participant in the avant-garde movement Metabolism, Maki has been at the forefront of his profession for decades. This collection of essays documents the evolution of architectural modernism and Maki's own fifty-year intellectual journey during a critical period of architectural and urban history. Maki's treatment of his two overarching themes—the contemporary city and modernist architecture—demonstrates strong (and sometimes unexpected) linkages between urban theory and architectural practice. Images and commentary on three of Maki's own works demonstrate the connection between his writing and his designs. Moving through the successive waves of modernism, postmodernism, neomodernism, and other isms, these essays reflect how several generations of architectural thought and expression have been resolved within one career.

Los presupuestos sexistas acerca de la vida familiar y el papel de la mujer se han introducido dentro del diseño de los edificios y las ciudades (inclusive en las construcciones mas modernas). Siete arquitectas y constructoras critican el entorno ambiental creado por los profesionales masculinos y muestran como las diseñadoras y consumidoras pueden trabajar juntas. Hablan de sus luchas para lograr un reconocimiento profesional, los intentos por mejorar el diseño de las casas para las clases trabajadoras en el periodo de entreguerras y de los experimentos, tales como restaurantes comunales durante la segunda guerra mundial, que pusieron en cuestion la convencion de que el lugar de la mujer esta en el hogar.