American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture

American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture PDF Author: Alice T. Friedman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300230932
Category : Aesthetics, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
"The sleek lines and gleaming facades of the architecture of the late 1940s and 1950s reflect a culture fascinated by the promise of the Jet Age. Buildings like Eero Saarinen's TWA Terminal at JFK Airport and Philip Johnson's Four Seasons Restaurant retain a thrilling allure, seeming to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. In this work, distinguished architectural historian Alice Friedman draws on a vast range of sources to argue that the aesthetics of mid-century modern architecture reflect an increasing fascination with "glamour," a term widely used in those years to characterize objects, people, and experiences as luxurious, expressive, and even magical. Featuring assessments of architectural examples ranging from Mies van der Rohe's monolithic Seagram Building to Elvis Presley's sprawling Graceland estate, as well as vintage photographs, advertisements, and posters, this book argues that new audiences and client groups with tastes rooted in popular entertainment made their presence felt in the cultural marketplace during the postwar period. The author suggests that American and European architecture and design increasingly reflected the values of a burgeoning consumer society, including a fundamental confidence in the power of material objects to transform the identity and status of those who owned them"--Publisher's description.

American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture

American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture PDF Author: Alice T. Friedman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300230932
Category : Aesthetics, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Get Book

Book Description
"The sleek lines and gleaming facades of the architecture of the late 1940s and 1950s reflect a culture fascinated by the promise of the Jet Age. Buildings like Eero Saarinen's TWA Terminal at JFK Airport and Philip Johnson's Four Seasons Restaurant retain a thrilling allure, seeming to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. In this work, distinguished architectural historian Alice Friedman draws on a vast range of sources to argue that the aesthetics of mid-century modern architecture reflect an increasing fascination with "glamour," a term widely used in those years to characterize objects, people, and experiences as luxurious, expressive, and even magical. Featuring assessments of architectural examples ranging from Mies van der Rohe's monolithic Seagram Building to Elvis Presley's sprawling Graceland estate, as well as vintage photographs, advertisements, and posters, this book argues that new audiences and client groups with tastes rooted in popular entertainment made their presence felt in the cultural marketplace during the postwar period. The author suggests that American and European architecture and design increasingly reflected the values of a burgeoning consumer society, including a fundamental confidence in the power of material objects to transform the identity and status of those who owned them"--Publisher's description.

American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture

American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture PDF Author: Alice T. Friedman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Alice Friedman argues that the aesthetics of mid-20th century modern architecture reflect an increasing fascination with 'glamour', a term used in those years to characterise objects, people, & experiences as luxurious, expressive & even magical.

Glamour and Gloom

Glamour and Gloom PDF Author: Tanja Poppelreuter
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780900457814
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


USA

USA PDF Author: Gwendolyn Wright
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1861895402
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
From the Reliance Building and Coney Island to the Kimbell Museum and Disney Hall, the United States has been at the forefront of modern architecture. American life has generated many of the quintessential images of modern life, both generic types and particular buildings. Gwendolyn Wright’s USA is an engaging account of this evolution from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Upending conventional arguments about the origin of American modern architecture, Wright shows that it was not a mere offshoot of European modernism brought across the Atlantic Ocean by émigrés but rather an exciting, distinctive and mutable hybrid. USA traces a history that spans from early skyscrapers and suburbs in the aftermath of the American Civil War up to the museums, schools and ‘green architecture’ of today. Wright takes account of diverse interests that affected design, ranging from politicians and developers to ambitious immigrants and middle-class citizens. Famous and lesser-known buildings across America come together--model dwellings for German workers in rural Massachusetts, New York’s Rockefeller Center, Cincinnati’s Carew Tower, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West in the Arizona desert, the University of Miami campus, the Texas Instruments Semiconductor Plant, and the Corning Museum of Glass, among others--to show an extraordinary range of innovation. Ultimately, Wright reframes the history of American architecture as one of constantly evolving and volatile sensibilities, engaged with commerce, attuned to new media, exploring multiple concepts of freedom. The chapters are organized to show how changes in work life, home life and public life affected architecture--and vice versa. This book provides essential background for contemporary debates about affordable and luxury housing, avant-garde experiments, local identities, inspiring infrastructure and sustainable design. A clear, concise and richly illustrated account of modern American architecture, this timely book will be essential for all those who wonder about the remarkable legacy of American modernity in its most potent cultural expression.

Cape Cod Modern

Cape Cod Modern PDF Author: Peter McMahon
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781935202165
Category : Architect-designed houses
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In the summer of 1937, Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, rented a house on Planting Island, near the base of Cape Cod. Thus began a chapter in the history of modern architecture that has never been told _until now. The area was a hotbed of intellectual currents from New York, Boston, Cambridge and the country's top schools of architecture and design. Avant-garde homes began to appear in the woods and on the dunes; by the 1970s, there were about 100 modern houses of interest here.

Classical New York

Classical New York PDF Author: Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823281043
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
During the rise of New York from the capital of an upstart nation to a global metropolis, the visual language of Greek and Roman antiquity played a formative role in the development of the city’s art and architecture. This compilation of essays offers a survey of diverse reinterpretations of classical forms in some of New York’s most iconic buildings, public monuments, and civic spaces. Classical New York examines the influence of Greco-Roman thought and design from the Greek Revival of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through the late-nineteenth-century American Renaissance and Beaux Arts period and into the twentieth century’s Art Deco. At every juncture, New Yorkers looked to the classical past for knowledge and inspiration in seeking out new ways to cultivate a civic identity, to design their buildings and monuments, and to structure their public and private spaces. Specialists from a range of disciplines—archaeology, architectural history, art history, classics, and history— focus on how classical art and architecture are repurposed to help shape many of New York City’s most evocative buildings and works of art. Federal Hall evoked the Parthenon as an architectural and democratic model; the Pantheon served as a model for the creation of Libraries at New York University and Columbia University; Pennsylvania Station derived its form from the Baths of Caracalla; and Atlas and Prometheus of Rockefeller Center recast ancient myths in a new light during the Great Depression. Designed to add breadth and depth to the exchange of ideas about the place and meaning of ancient Greece and Rome in our experience of New York City today, this examination of post-Revolutionary art, politics, and philosophy enriches the conversation about how we shape space—be it civic, religious, academic, theatrical, or domestic—and how we make use of that space and the objects in it.

Women and the Making of the Modern House

Women and the Making of the Modern House PDF Author: Alice T. Friedman
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300117899
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Investigates how women patrons of architecture were essential catalysts for innovation in domestic architectural design. This book explores the challenges that unconventional attitudes and ways of life presented to architectural thinking, and to the architects themselves.

Douglas Snelling

Douglas Snelling PDF Author: Davina Jackson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317148304
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Douglas Burrage Snelling (1916–85) was one of Britain’s significant emigré architects and designers. Born in Kent and educated in New Zealand, he became one of Australia’s leading mid-century architects, of luxury residences and commercial buildings, and a trend-setting designer of furniture, interiors and landscapes. This is the first comprehensive study of Snelling’s pan-Pacific life, works and trans-disciplinary significance. It provides a critical examination of this controversial modernist, revealing him to be a colourful and talented protagonist who led antipodean interpretations of American, especially Wrightian and southern Californian, architecture, design and lifestyle innovations.

Experiencing Architecture, second edition

Experiencing Architecture, second edition PDF Author: Steen Eiler Rasmussen
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262680028
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
A classic examination of superb design through the centuries. Widely regarded as a classic in the field, Experiencing Architecture explores the history and promise of good design. Generously illustrated with historical examples of designing excellence—ranging from teacups, riding boots, and golf balls to the villas of Palladio and the fish-feeding pavilion of Beijing's Winter Palace—Rasmussen's accessible guide invites us to appreciate architecture not only as a profession, but as an art that shapes everyday experience. In the past, Rasmussen argues, architecture was not just an individual pursuit, but a community undertaking. Dwellings were built with a natural feeling for place, materials and use, resulting in “a remarkably suitable comeliness.” While we cannot return to a former age, Rasmussen notes, we can still design spaces that are beautiful and useful by seeking to understand architecture as an art form that must be experienced. An understanding of good design comes not only from one's professional experience of architecture as an abstract, individual pursuit, but also from one's shared, everyday experience of architecture in real time—its particular use of light, color, shape, scale, texture, rhythm and sound. Experiencing Architecture reminds us of what good architectural design has accomplished over time, what it can accomplish still, and why it is worth pursuing. Wide-ranging and approachable, it is for anyone who has ever wondered “what instrument the architect plays on.”

Aesthetic Capitalism

Aesthetic Capitalism PDF Author: Eduardo de la Fuente
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004274723
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Aesthetic Capitalism debates the social aesthetics of contemporary economic processes. The book connects modern cultural dynamics with the workings of contemporary capitalism. It explores art and the new spirit of capitalism; visual culture and the experience economy; aesthetics and organisations; the art of fiscal management; capitalism without myth; and architecture in the age of aesthetic capitalism. Contributors include: Peter Murphy, Eduardo de la Fuente, Antonio Strati, Ken Friedman, Dominique Bouchet, Anders Michelsen, David Roberts, Carlo Tognato