At the End of the Century: One Hundred Years of Architecture - Softcover

Museum Of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, Calif.)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0914357557 ISBN 13: 9780914357551

Publisher: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998

Synopsis

Examines the world's most significant architects and structures

About this title

Review:

This 330-page tome contains seven essays and more than 300 illustrations. The catalog of an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, it is not a history of 20th-century architecture, per se. But there is enough information, both visual and verbal, to ground any thoroughgoing reader in the architectural theory of the century. All the classics are covered: the Chrysler building; Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater; Bauhaus buildings; world's fair pavilions, including Moshe Safdie's Habitat '67; Saarinen's sweeping rooflines; Sutemi Horiguchi's measured modernism; the Sydney Opera House; Pompidou Center in Paris; and hundreds of other iconic images.

Some of the written material lacks the crisp, clean style of the architecture, but the book is brainy and provocative, and some of the essays are brilliant. French architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen, a specialist on the international impact of modernism and "Americanism," contributed a multifaceted chapter in which he analyses urban architecture, urban planning, political forces fomenting or forbidding change, new towns, the vertical city and its effects on individualism, and more.

The pictures are often small but always clear, many in color, including plans, paintings and drawings, maps, and movie stills. --Peggy Moorman

From Library Journal:

This thick catalog presents seven thematic essays by leading scholars and commentators on 20th-century architecture, covering such topics as Latin America, Japan, urbanism, regionalism, and "The Exhibitionist House." The essays vary in usefulness and value, from Beatriz Colomina's pungent commentaries on modern housing prototypes presented at international exhibitions to Anthony Vidler's highly abstract treatment of the space-time continuum. The authors have taken pains to include as much regionalist material as possible; indeed, the character of modern architecture morphs from internationalism into regionalism under the impact of this fair-sized volume. The result is a more politically correct treatment of modern architecture. The catalog accompanies an exhibition of the same name that will appear at leading museums around the world over the next two years, but the text will limit the book's appeal to serious readers.?Peter S. Kaufman, Boston Architectural Ctr.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Museum of Contemporary Art
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0914357557
• ISBN 13: 9780914357551
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336
• Editor: Ferguson Russell, Smith Elizabeth A. T., Celik Zeynep, Koshalek Richard