"The present book on the life and work of Joze Plecnik (1872-1957) represents a timely novelty. It is only recently that Plecnik has gained recognition as the most important Slovene and Yugoslav artist, and that his name has become fully integrated into our cultural awareness. His rise to world prominence was finally consolidated in 1986 with the great retrospective exhibition of his work at the Pompidou Center in Paris." "In the past decade, Plecnik has emerged not only as a member of Moderna, the Slovene artistic movement that encompassed the period from the end of the 19th-century to World War I, but also as a powerful representative of 20th-century Modernism. He has escaped any theoretical categorization, since he did not embrace any individual dogma or subscribe to any specific modernist doctrine. Incorporating both historical and modern elements, his work offered a necessary stepping stone between 19th-century eclecticism and contemporary functionalism." "This is the first truly comprehensive monograph on Plecnik's work, based on more than fifteen years of research by author Peter Krecic. Following a chronological organization, the author explores Plecnik's life from his education and architectural training to his professional development and mature production. Mr. Krecic examines in detail the architect's fundamental works, as well as his methodology and design process. With over 300 illustrations, including splendid photographic documentation and many facsimiles of original drawings from Plecnik's archives, this book is incomparable in beauty and quality."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Why urban design is larger than architecture: the foundational qualities of urban design, examples and practitioners Urban design in practice is incremental, but architects imagine it as scaled-up architecture—large, ready-to-build pop-up cities. This paradox of urban design is rarely addressed; indeed, urban design as a discipline lacks a theoretical foundation. In The Largest Art, Brent Ryan argues that urban design encompasses more than architecture, and he provides a foundational theory of urban design beyond the architectural scale. In a “declaration of independence” for urban design, Ryan describes urban design as the largest of the building arts, with qualities of its own. Ryan distinguishes urban design from its sister arts by its pluralism: plural scale, ranging from an alleyway to a region; plural time, because it is deeply enmeshed in both history and the present; plural property, with many owners; plural agents, with many makers; and plural form, with a distributed quality that allows it to coexist with diverse elements of the city. Ryan looks at three well-known urban design projects through the lens of pluralism: a Brancusi sculptural ensemble in Romania, a Bronx housing project, and a formally and spatially diverse grouping of projects in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He revisits the thought of three plural urbanists working between 1960 and 1980: David Crane, Edmund Bacon, and Kevin Lynch. And he tells three design stories for the future, imaginary scenarios of plural urbanism in locations around the world. Ryan concludes his manifesto with three signal considerations urban designers must acknowledge: eternal change, inevitable incompletion, and flexible fidelity. Cities are ceaselessly active, perpetually changing. It is the urban designer's task to make art with aesthetic qualities that can survive perpetual change.

Six million people visit Prague Castle each year. Here is the story of how this ancient citadel was transformed after World War I from a neglected, run-down relic into the seat of power for independent Czechoslovakia?and the symbolic center of democratic postwar Europe. The restoration of Prague Castle was a collaboration of three remarkable figures in twentieth-century east central Europe: Tom ? Masaryk, the philosopher who became Czechoslovakia?s first president; his daughter Alice, a social worker trained in the settlement houses of Chicago who was founding director of the Czechoslovak Red Cross and her father?s trusted confidante; and the architect, Jo?e Ple?nik of Slovenia, who integrated reverence for Classical architecture into distinctly modern designs. Their shared vision saw the Castle not simply as a government building or historic landmark but as the sacred center of the new republic, even the new Europe?a place that would embody a different kind of democratic politics, rooted in the spiritual and the moral. With a biographer?s attention to detail, historian Bruce Berglund presents lively and intimate portraits of these three figures. At the same time, he also places them in the context of politics and culture in interwar Prague and the broader history of religion and secularization in modern Europe. Gracefully written and grounded in a wide array of sources, Castle and Cathedral in Modern Prague is an original and accessible study of how people at the center of Europe, in the early decades of the twentieth century, struggled with questions of morality, faith, loyalty, and skepticism.

In this book modernity is the site that poses the question of how we are to continue when every attempt to think and understand the present is marked by the necessity of an interruption.

Modernity tends to be considered a mostly Western, chronologically recent concept. Looking at locations in Brazil, Java, India, Georgia, and Yugoslavia, among others, Across Space and Time provides architectural and cultural evidence that modernity has had an impact across the globe and for much longer than previously conceived. This volume moves through space and time to illustrate the way global modernity has been negotiated through architecture, urban planning, design pedagogies, preservation, and art history in diverse locations around the world. Bringing together emerging and established architecture and art history scholars, each chapter focuses on a particular site where modernity was defined, challenged, or reinterpreted. The contributors examine how architectures, landscapes, and design thinking influence and are influenced by conflicts between cultural, economic, technological, and political forces. By invoking well-researched histories to ground their work in a post-colonial critique, they closely examine many prevailing myths of modernity. Notable topics include emerging architectural history in the Indian subcontinent and the connection between climate change and architecture. Ultimately, Across Space and Time contributes to the ongoing critique of architecture and its history, both as a discipline and within the academy. The authors insist that architecture is more than a style. It is a powerful expression of representational power that reveals how a society negotiates its progress.

A Handbook to Classical Reception in Eastern and Central Europe is the first comprehensive English ]language study of the reception of classical antiquity in Eastern and Central Europe. This groundbreaking work offers detailed case studies of thirteen countries that are fully contextualized historically, locally, and regionally. The first English-language collection of research and scholarship on Greco-Roman heritage in Eastern and Central Europe Written and edited by an international group of seasoned and up-and-coming scholars with vast subject-matter experience and expertise Essays from leading scholars in the field provide broad insight into the reception of the classical world within specific cultural and geographical areas Discusses the reception of many aspects of Greco-Roman heritage, such as prose/philosophy, poetry, material culture Offers broad and significant insights into the complicated engagement many countries of Eastern and Central Europe have had and continue to have with Greco-Roman antiquity

This book takes a new approach to interwar Prague by addressing religion as an integral part of the city's cultural history. Berglund views Prague's cultural history in the broader context of religious change and secularization in 20th-century Europe. Based on detailed knowledge of sources, the monograph explores the interdisciplinary linkages between politics, architecture and theology in the building of symbolism and a "new mythology" of the first Czechoslovak republic (1918-1938). Berglunds text provides an important service for understanding both Czech history as well as current Czech political debate. The author's method can be characterized as culture history, able to connect several disciplines, emphasizing common topic (religion, politics, symbolics). Modern Czech elites, superficially characterized as "ateistic", appears in a new light to be deeply religious, a transition from more traditional, (mostly) Catholic religiosity, to a concept of a new, modern, ethical religion. The study incorporates biographical research, focusing on three principal characters: Tomás Garrigue Masaryk, Czechoslovakia's first president; his daughter Alice Garrigue Masaryková, founding director of the Czechoslovak Red Cross; and Joze Plecnik, the Slovenian architect who directed the renovations of Prague Castle.