The Sources of Modern Architecture and Design

An updated edition of this classic survey of the origins of twentieth-century ideas in architecture and the applied arts.

The turn of the nineteenth century saw an extraordinary flowering of invention in architecture and design, leading to the emergence of two contrasting styles: art nouveau and the International Style. Professor Nikolaus Pevsner brings clarity to this period of dynamic change by tracing the origins of twentieth-century ideas in architecture and the applied arts.

Featuring a new foreword by the distinguished architectural historian Kenneth Frampton, The Sources of Modern Architecture and Design has now been updated with color illustrations throughout.

196 color illustrations

Sir Nikolaus Pevsner (1902–1983) was the Slade professor of fine art, University of Cambridge, and a fellow of St John’s College. He was the first professor of the history of art department at Birkbeck College, University of London, retiring in 1969. He is probably best known for The Buildings of England, completed in more than fifty volumes shortly before his death, and for his An Outline of European Architecture, which has remained a standard work for over forty years.

Kenneth Frampton was born in 1930 and trained as an architect at the Architectural Association School of Architecture. From 1972 to 2019 he served as Ware professor of architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2018, he was awarded the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale. His publications include Studies in Tectonic Culture: the Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture; Labour, Work and Architecture: Collected Essays on Architecture and Design; American Masterworks: The Twentieth-Century House; Kengo Kuma: Complete Works; A Genealogy of Modern Architecture: Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form; Modern Architecture: A Critical History; and Le Corbusier.