Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light

Belier, Corinne, Barry Bergdoll, Marc Le Couer, and Martin Bressani

ISBN 10: 0870708392 / ISBN 13: 9780870708398

Published by Musuem of Modern Art, New York, 2012

About this Item

Brown cloth boards, color-photographic dust jacket with red and white lettering. 270 pp. Mainly color illustrations. Plans. Photo is of a previous copy in our collection; copy is not shrink-wrapped. Henri Labrouste is one of the few nineteenth-century architects consistently lionized as a precursor of modern architecture throughout the twentieth century and into our own time. The two magisterial glass-and-iron reading rooms he built in Paris gave form to the idea of the modern library as a collective civic space. His influence was both immediate and long-lasting, not only on the development of the modern library but also on the exploration of new paradigms of space, materials and luminosity in places of great public assembly. Published to accompany the first exhibition devoted to Labrouste in the United States - and the first anywhere in the world in nearly 40 years - this publication presents nearly 225 works in all media, including drawings, watercolors, vintage and modern photographs, film stills and architectural models. Essays by a range of international architecture scholars explore Labrouste's work and legacy through a variety of approaches. VG (light wear to boards & corners. dustjacket has light edge-wear, scratches & rubbing; lower edge may have small tear & curling).

Seller Inventory # 171592

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light
• Publisher: Musuem of Modern Art, New York
• Publication Date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0870708392
• ISBN 13: 9780870708398
• Binding: Hardcover
• Seller catalogs:
  • Architects and Firms - European
  • European Architecture

About this title

Synopsis

Henri Labrouste is one of the few nineteenth-century architects consistently lionized as a precursor of modern architecture throughout the twentieth century and into our own time. The two magisterial glass-and-iron reading rooms he built in Paris gave form to the idea of the modern library as a collective civic space. His influence was both immediate and long-lasting, not only on the development of the modern library but also on the exploration of new paradigms of space, materials and luminosity in places of great public assembly. Published to accompany the first exhibition devoted to Labrouste in the United States--and the first anywhere in the world in nearly 40 years--this publication presents nearly 225 works in all media, including drawings, watercolors, vintage and modern photographs, film stills and architectural models. Essays by a range of international architecture scholars explore Labrouste’s work and legacy through a variety of approaches.

Review

These Americans recognized Labrouste as a provocateur and poet with a pen and pencil whose influence reverberated across the centuries. (Michael Kimmelman The New York Times)

Labrouste (1801-75) gracefully transformed the classical language of masonry into an architecture suffused with space and light by exploiting the new structural possibilities of iron in his civic monuments. (Suzanne Stephens Architectural Record)

The book gives the building meaning in exchange for shelter. (Justin Davidson New York Magazine)

A catalogue with essays by each curator, as well as by Levine and David Van Zanten, will further illuminate the solecistic inventiveness of this student of the Ecole who at once brilliantly articulated and subtly but forcefully undermined its classical orthodoxies. (Edward Eigen Artforum)