A photographic collection, falling somewhere between topographical documentation and conceptual art, catalogs a village of houses built between 1870 and 1914 in the Siegen region of Germany, one of the oldest iron-producing areas of Europe.

For more than five decades, Bernd (1931–2007) and Hilla (1934–2015) Becher collaborated on photographs of industrial architecture in Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, Great Britain, and the United States. This sweeping monograph features the Bechers’ quintessential pictures, which present water towers, gas tanks, blast furnaces, and more as sculptural objects. Beyond the Bechers’ iconic Typologies, the book includes Bernd’s early drawings, Hilla’s independent photographs, and excerpts from their notes, sketchbooks, and journals. The book’s authors offer new insights into the development of the artists’ process, their work’s conceptual underpinnings, the photographers’ relationship to deindustrialization, and the artists’ legacy. An essay by award-winning cultural historian Lucy Sante and an interview with Max Becher, the artists’ son, make this volume an unrivaled look into the Bechers’ art alongside their career, life, and subjects.

In Hybrid Practices, essays by established and emerging scholars investigate the rich ecology of practices that typified the era of the Cold War. The volume showcases three projects at the forefront of unprecedented collaboration between the arts and new sectors of industrial society in the 1960s and 70s—Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), the Art and Technology Project at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (A&T), and the Artist Placement Group (APG) in the UK. The subjects covered include collaborative projects between artists and scientists, commercial ventures and experiments in intermedia, multidisciplinary undertakings, effacing authorship to activate the spectator, suturing gaps between art and government, and remapping the landscape of everyday life in terms of technological mediation. Among the artists discussed in the volume and of interest to a broad public beyond the art world are Bernd and Hilla Becher, John Cage, Hans Haacke, Robert Irwin, John Latham, Fujiko Nakaya, Carolee Schneemann, James Turrell, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, and Robert Whitman. Prominent engineers and scientists appearing in the book’s pages include Elsa Garmire, Billy Klüver, Frank Malina, Stanley Milgram, and Ed Wortz. This valuable collection aims to introduce readers not only to hybrid work in and as depth, but also to work in and as breadth, across disciplinary practices where the real questions of hybridity are determined.

The more than two hundred striking duotone plates in Hilla and Bernd Becher's Industrial Facades continue the famousD?orf photographers' formal investigation of industrial structures, in this case the frontal elevations of factory buildings. Like the Bechers' earlier books on water towers, blast furnaces, and gas tanks, Industrial Facades once again clearly displays their serenely cool, rigorous approach to the structures they photograph as vaariations on an ideal form. The Bechers make no attempt to analyze or explain their subjects. Captions contain only the barest of information: time and place. Industrial Facades covers the whole range of periods and designs representing this building type: from austere brick buildings of the early industrial age and the arched windows and turrets decorating historicist facades, to the concrete and glass functionalist constructions of the 1950s and 1960s, to today's rectangular, windowless halls. These photographs give the lie to Louis Sullivan's often misunderstood motto, "form follows function," for the external appearance of the factory buildings shown here are hardly determined by their internal working processes. For this reason, the Bechers' photographs do not really illustrate the development of modern industrial architecture, nor the achievements of functionalist building, but rather the achievements of banal, everyday architecture, produced by builders trained in crafts or by engineers trained in the necessities of the industrial process. * Not for sale in France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, and Austria