Richard Riemerschmid's Extraordinary Living Things
Title | Richard Riemerschmid's Extraordinary Living Things PDF eBook |
Author | Freyja Hartzell |
Publisher | MIT Press |
Pages | 413 |
Release | 2022-11-01 |
Genre | Design |
ISBN | 026204742X |
How Richard Riemerschmid’s designs of everyday—but “extraordinary”—objects recalibrate our understanding of modernism. At the beginning of the twentieth century, German artist Richard Riemerschmid (1868–1957) was known as a symbolist painter and, by the advent of World War I, had become an important modern architect. This, however, the first English-language book on Riemerschmid, celebrates his understudied legacy as a designer of everyday objects—furniture, tableware, clothing—that were imbued with an extraordinary sense of vitality and even personality. Freyja Hartzell makes a case for the importance of Riemerschmid's designed objects in the development of modern design—and for the power of everyday things to change the way we live our lives, understand history, and design our future. Hartzell offers for the first time an interpretive history of Riemerschmid's design practice embedded in a fresh examination of modernism told by the objects themselves. Hartzell explores Riemerschmid's early drawings, paintings, and prints; his interiors and housewares, which represent a modernist shift from exclusive image to accessible object; his designs for women's clothing; his immensely popular wooden furniture; his serially produced ceramics and their appeal to German nationalism of the period; and his complex and compelling pattern designs for textiles and wallpapers, the only part of his creative practice that spanned his entire career. Riemerschmid, Hartzell writes, was at his most inventive, playful, and free when designing things for everyday use. His uniquely designed forms allow us to recognize the utilitarian object not just as a tool but as an individual being—a thing with a soul.
Richard Riemerschmid's Extraordinary Living Things
Title | Richard Riemerschmid's Extraordinary Living Things PDF eBook |
Author | Freyja Thorbjørn Hartzell |
Publisher | |
Pages | |
Release | 2022 |
Genre | |
ISBN | 9780262371704 |
"Richard Riemerschmid's impact and influence as a designer of fantastical everday objects-model radical experiments of a critically re-evaluated modernism"--
Sandfuture
Title | Sandfuture PDF eBook |
Author | Justin Beal |
Publisher | MIT Press |
Pages | 273 |
Release | 2021-09-14 |
Genre | Architecture |
ISBN | 0262367181 |
An account of the life and work of the architect Minoru Yamasaki that leads the author to consider how (and for whom) architectural history is written. Sandfuture is a book about the life of the architect Minoru Yamasaki (1912–1986), who remains on the margins of history despite the enormous influence of his work on American architecture and society. That Yamasaki’s most famous projects—the Pruitt-Igoe apartments in St. Louis and the original World Trade Center in New York—were both destroyed on national television, thirty years apart, makes his relative obscurity all the more remarkable. Sandfuture is also a book about an artist interrogating art and architecture’s role in culture as New York changes drastically after a decade bracketed by terrorism and natural disaster. From the central thread of Yamasaki’s life, Sandfuture spirals outward to include reflections on a wide range of subjects, from the figure of the architect in literature and film and transformations in the contemporary art market to the perils of sick buildings and the broader social and political implications of how, and for whom, cities are built. The result is at once sophisticated in its understanding of material culture and novelistic in its telling of a good story.
Nurturing Dreams
Title | Nurturing Dreams PDF eBook |
Author | Fumihiko Maki |
Publisher | MIT Press |
Pages | 292 |
Release | 2012-09-21 |
Genre | Architecture |
ISBN | 0262311682 |
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.
Le Corbusier and the Occult
Title | Le Corbusier and the Occult PDF eBook |
Author | Jan Birksted |
Publisher | MIT Press |
Pages | 418 |
Release | 2009 |
Genre | Compagnonnages |
ISBN | 0262026481 |
"Le Corbusier grew up in La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland, a city described by Karl Marx as "one unified watchmaking industry." Among the unifying social structures of La Chaux-de-Fonds was the Loge L'Amitié, the Masonic lodge with its francophone moral, social, and philosophical ideas, including the symbolic iconography of the right angle (rectitude) and the compass (exactitude). Le Corbusier would later describe these as "my guide, my choice" and as his "time-honored ideas, ingrained and deep-rooted in the intellect, like entries from a catechism." Through exhaustive research that challenges long-held beliefs, J.K. Birksted's Le Corbusier and the Occult traces the structure of Le Corbusier's brand of modernist spatial and architectural ideas based on startling new documents in hitherto undiscovered family and local archives."--Publisher.
Becoming Bucky Fuller
Title | Becoming Bucky Fuller PDF eBook |
Author | Loretta Lorance |
Publisher | MIT Press |
Pages | 307 |
Release | 2009 |
Genre | Architects |
ISBN | 0262123029 |
Concerned with the origins and development of the Dymaxion House project as well as Fuller's public persona, the author uses Buckminster Fuller's archives, particularly the multivolume "Chronofile" to construct a history parallel to the accepted sequence of events.
A History of Interior Design
Title | A History of Interior Design PDF eBook |
Author | John F. Pile |
Publisher | Laurence King Publishing |
Pages | 476 |
Release | 2005 |
Genre | Design |
ISBN | 1856694186 |
Delivers the inside story on 6,000 years of personal and public space. John Pile acknowledges that interior design is a field with unclear boundaries, in which construction, architecture, the arts and crafts, technology and product design all overlap.