Presents 2 villas, now museums, designed by Mies van der Rohe. A further understanding is given by examining specific on-site interventions by artists Yves Klein, Sol LeWitt, Richard Serra and Ernst Caramelle.

While modernism was publicized as a fusion of technology, new materials, and rational aesthetics to improve the lives of ordinary people, it was often out of reach to the very masses it purportedly served. Luxury and Modernism shows how luxury was present in bold, literal forms in modern designs—from lavish materials and costly technologies to deluxe buildings and household objects—and in subtler ways as well, such as social milieus and modes of living. In a period of social unrest and extreme wealth disparity between the common worker and those at the helm of capitalist enterprises generating immense profits, architects envisioned modern designs providing solutions for a more equitable future. Robin Schuldenfrei exposes the disconnect between modernism's utopian discourse and its luxury objects and elite architectural commissions. Despite the movement's egalitarian rhetoric, many modern designs addressed the desires of the privileged individual. Yet as Schuldenfrei demonstrates, luxury was integral not only to how modern buildings and objects were designed, manufactured, and sold, but has contributed to modernism's appeal to this day. This beautifully illustrated book provides a new interpretation of modern architecture and design in Germany during the heyday of the Bauhaus and the Werkbund, tracing modernism's lasting allure to its many manifestations of luxury. Schuldenfrei casts the work of legendary figures such as Peter Behrens, Walter Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in an entirely different light, revealing the complexities and contradictions inherent to modernism's promotion and consumption.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was one of the leading figures of twentieth-century architecture. For architects and many others who are committed to the modernist tradition, he is a pivotal figure. With in-depth, scholarly essays and opulent photographs and plans, this book traces the multifaceted development of his work, including his first Berlin buildings, his villa projects, his work at the Bauhaus in the 1930s, and his American projects of the postwar years. Jean-Louis Cohen was the director of the Institut français d’architecture until 2003 and is currently a professor at New York University. He has an established reputation as a leading international historian of architecture. His broad and encompassing perspective makes this book a reliable and comprehensive introduction to the work of Mies van der Rohe. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe gehörte zu den führenden Persönlichkeiten in der Architektur des 20. Jahrhunderts und ist für Architekten und viele andere, die sich der Tradition der Moderne verpflichtet haben, eine Schlüsselfigur. Mit wissenschaftlich fundierten Texten und opulentem Plan- und Fotomaterial zeichnet das Buch die facettenreiche Entwicklung seines Werkes nach: Die ersten Berliner Bauten, seine Villenprojekte und Tätigkeit am Bauhaus in den dreißiger Jahren sowie die amerikanischen Projekte der Nachkriegszeit. Jean-Louis Cohen, bis 2003 Direktor des Institut français d’architecture und zur Zeit Professor an der New York University, hat einen etablierten Ruf als international führender Architekturhistoriker. Seine umfassende Perspektive macht das Buch zu einer verlässlichen Einführung in das Werk Mies van der Rohes.

Using empathy, as established by the Vienna School of Art History, complemented by insights on how the mind processes visual stimuli, as demonstrated by late 19th-century psychologists and art theorists, this book puts forward an innovative interpretative method of decoding the forms and spaces of Modern buildings. This method was first developed as scholars realized that the new abstract art appearing needed to be analysed differently than the previous figurative works. Since architecture experienced a similar development in the 1920s and 30s, this book argues that the empathetic method can also be used in architectural interpretation. While most existing scholarship tends to focus on formal and functional analysis, this book proposes that Modern architecture is too diverse to be reduced to a few common formal or ornamental features. Instead, by relying on the viewer’s innate psycho-physiological perceptive abilities, sensual and intuitive understandings of composition, form, and space are emphasized. These aspects are especially significant because Modern Architecture lacks the traditional stylistic signs. Including building analyses, it shows how, by visually reducing cubical forms and spaces to linear configurations, the exteriors and interiors of Modern buildings can be interpreted via human perceptive abilities as dynamic movement systems commensurate with the new industrial transportation age. This reveals an inner necessity these buildings express about themselves and their culture, rather than just an explanation of how they are assembled and how they should be used. The case studies highlight the contrasts between buildings designed by different architects, rather than concentrating on the few features that relate them to the zeitgeist. It analyses the buildings directly as the objects of study, not indirectly, as designs filtered through a philosophical or theoretical discourse. The book demonstrates that, with technology and science affecting culture

An important resource for scholars of contemporary art and architecture, this volume considers contemporary art that takes architecture as its subject. Concentrated on works made since 1990, Contemporary Art About Architecture: A Strange Utility is the first to take up this topic in a sustained and explicit manner and the first to advance the idea that contemporary art functions as a form of architectural history, theory, and analysis. Over the course of fourteen essays by both emerging and established scholars, this volume examines a diverse group of artists in conjunction with the vernacular, canonical, and fantastical structures engaged by their work. I? Manglano-Ovalle, Matthew Barney, Monika Sosnowska, Pipo Nguyen-duy, and Paul Pfeiffer are among those considered, as are the compelling questions of architecture's relationship to photography, the evolving legacy of Mies van der Rohe, the notion of an architectural unconscious, and the provocative concepts of the unbuilt and the unbuildable. Through a rigorous investigation of these issues, Contemporary Art About Architecture calls attention to the fact that art is now a vital form of architectural discourse. Indeed, this phenomenon is both pervasive and, in its individual incarnations, compelling - a reason to think again about the entangled histories of architecture and art.

This book presents the first detailed mathematical analysis of the social, cognitive and experiential properties of Modernist domestic architecture. The Modern Movement in architecture, which came to prominence during the first half of the twentieth century, may have been famous for its functional forms and machine-made aesthetic, but it also sought to challenge the way people inhabit, understand and experience space. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s buildings were not only minimalist and transparent, they were designed to subvert traditional social hierarchies. Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic Modernism not only attempted to negotiate a more responsive relationship between nature and architecture, but also shape the way people experience space. Richard Neutra’s Californian Modernism is traditionally celebrated for its sleek, geometric forms, but his intention was to use design to support a heightened understanding of context. Glenn Murcutt’s pristine pavilions, seemingly the epitome of regional Modernism, actually raise important questions about the socio-spatial structure of architecture. Rather than focussing on form or style in Modernism, this book examines the spatial, social and experiential properties of thirty-seven designs by Wright, Mies, Neutra and Murcutt. The computational and mathematical methods used for this purpose are drawn from space syntax, isovist geometry and graph theory. The specific issues that are examined include: the sensory and emotional appeal of space and form; shifting social and spatial structures in architectural planning; wayfinding and visual understanding; and the relationship between form and program.

Looking at diverse visions of the modern house, before placing them in the context of the technological and aesthetic concerns of architects, this text features illustrations and architectural drawings for every project, covering various aspects of contemporary house architecture.