This valuable reference for today’s green building movement examines twentieth-century modern architecture, including buildings by Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer, through the lens of sustainability. The hottest topics in contemporary architectural design and architectural history—the focus on sustainability and the evaluation of the modern movement—meet in Lessons from Modernism, a partnership with The Cooper Union that explores the ways in which the straightforward functional approach of modernist design creates environmentally sensitive solutions. Lessons from Modernism provides new insights into 25 buildings by a diverse selection of architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Paul Rudolph, Jean Prouvé, and Arne Jacobsen, and demonstrates how these architects integrated environmental concerns into their designs. Buildings are located across the United States, Central and South America, Cuba, Japan and more—and include houses, art centers, commercial buildings, and civic buildings. Lessons from Modernism is an affordable reference work for all interested in how architecture intersects with the green movement, pairing full descriptions of all buildings with analytical essays, featuring charts of climate zones and solar movement, and concluding with a comprehensive chronology that details how environmental consciousness evolved throughout the twentieth century.

What are the relations between a man's life and his art? What is the place of modern art in the culture and education of today? What are the limits of human expression and of the expressivity of voice and body? These are some of the questions raised by Gabriel Josipovici in this collection of essays.

"Le Corbusier and Sardinian-born sculptor Costatino Nivola met in 1946 in New York. The Franco-Swiss architect was working with a team around Oscar Niemeyer on the project for the United Nations headquarters, the artist had been living there in exile since 1939. Their meeting marked the beginning of a life-long friendship between the two, with Le Corbusier sharing Nivola's Greenwich Village studio while working on the United Nations project and, in 1950, creating two murals in the kitchen of Nivola's East Hampton home. The artist put together a collection of some 300 drawings, six paintings, and six sculptures by his architect friend which today are held in various places across Europe and America" -- Publicaciones Arquitectura y Arte.

In this wide-ranging and original account of Modernism, Michael Levenson draws on more than twenty years of research and a career-long fascination with the movement, its participants, and the period during which it thrived. Seeking a more subtle understanding of the relations between the period's texts and contexts, he provides not only an excellent survey but also a significant reassessment of Modernism itself. Spanning many decades, illuminating individual achievements and locating them within the intersecting histories of experiment (Symbolism to Surrealism, Naturalism to Expressionism, Futurism to Dadaism), the book places the transformations of culture alongside the agitations of modernity (war, revolution, feminism, psychoanalysis). In this perspective, Modernism must be understood more broadly than simply in terms of its provocative works, experimental forms, and singular careers. Rather, as Levenson demonstrates, Modernism should be viewed as the emergence of an adversary culture of the New that depended on audiences as well as artists, enemies as well as supporters. -- Book Description.

In this inventive mix of criticism, scholarship, and personal reflection, Carrie J. Preston explores the nature of cross-cultural teaching, learning, and performance. Throughout the twentieth century, Japanese noh was a major creative catalyst for American and European writers, dancers, and composers. The noh theater's stylized choreography, poetic chant, spectacular costumes and masks, and engagement with history inspired Western artists as they reimagined new approaches to tradition and form. In Learning to Kneel, Preston locates noh's important influence on such canonical figures as Pound, Yeats, Brecht, Britten, and Beckett. These writers learned about noh from an international cast of collaborators, and Preston traces the ways in which Japanese and Western artists influenced one another. Preston's critical work was profoundly shaped by her own training in noh performance technique under a professional actor in Tokyo, who taught her to kneel, bow, chant, and submit to the teachings of a conservative tradition. This encounter challenged Preston's assumptions about effective teaching, particularly her inclinations to emphasize Western ideas of innovation and subversion and to overlook the complex ranges of agency experienced by teachers and students. It also inspired new perspectives regarding the generative relationship between Western writers and Japanese performers. Pound, Yeats, Brecht, and others are often criticized for their orientalist tendencies and misappropriation of noh, but Preston's analysis and her journey reflect a more nuanced understanding of cultural exchange.

The worldwide use of building envelopes in steel and glass is one of the characteristic features of modern architecture. Many of these pre- and post-war buildings are now suffering severe defects in the building fabric, which necessitate measures to preserve the buildings. In this endeavor, aspects of architectural design, building physics, and the preservation of historic buildings play a key role. Using a selection of 20 iconic buildings in Europe and the USA, the book documents the current technological status of the three most common strategies used today: restoration, rehabilitation, and replacement. The buildings include Fallingwater House by Frank Lloyd Wright, Farnsworth House by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Fagus Factory and Bauhaus Building by Walter Gropius.