Vito Acconci is a key late twentieth-century pioneer of performance, video, installation and the exploration of architectural space. His work has expanded art's boundaries, moving beyond the gallery or museum into shared public spaces. Initially a poet, Acconci began making Conceptual art in the late 1960s. He devised actions, enacted them and documented them with texts, photographs or video. In 1972 he produced the most famous performance installation of its time, Seedbed. In an empty gallery he built a low ramp, concealed beneath which he stimulated himself with sexual fantasies about viewers walking above, speaking his fantasies into a microphone linked to loudspeakers. Startled spectators found themselves implicated in an intimate power relationship between artist and viewer. Since the mid 1980s his work has turned towards experimental architectural projects. In 1988 he set up the architectural practice Acconci Studio, which has public commissions around the world and was featured at the 
Venice Architecture Biennale in 2001. Acconci's work remains of vital importance not only to Conceptual art and performance, but to contemporary architectural theory and practice.

Vito Acconci (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Arts & Photography

Jennifer Bloomer

Mark C. Taylor

Vito Acconci

Frazer Ward

History & Criticism

Phaidon Press

In the wake of the Great Depression, one of Franklin Roosevelt's most successful New Deal programs was the formation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federal government owned corporation created in 1933 to revitalize the Tennessee River Valley. The TVA provided navigation, flood control, electricity generation, strategic materials for national defense, economic development, unemployment relief, and an overall improvement of living conditions in this once-impoverished rural area. The TVA Architects Office built a huge number of structures during the late 1930s and early 1940s, including the many dams that dramatically altered life in the Tennessee River Valley. Its design agenda was comprehensive, addressing all scales of design from door handles to landscape with equal dedication. The Tennessee Valley Authority: Design and Persuasion, the most in-depth examination of the TVA ever assembled, includes essays by experts in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, graphic design, industrial design, and the fine arts. In serving the social, political, and economic endeavors of the government, TVA architects directly helped shape the nascent American design culture and, arguably, create the finest extended body of modernist architecture and certainly its most technologically sublime in North America. Featuring an afterword by Senator Howard Baker, Jr. and new photography by Richard Barnes, The Tennessee Valley Authority interweaves technical, political, aesthetic, and cultural concerns to complete a missing chapter in the study of modern American architecture and design.

The Tennessee Valley Authority: Design and Persuasion

STEVEN HELLER

Christine Macy

Jane Wolff

Barry M. Katz

Todd Smith

Tim Culvahouse

Photography & Video

Princeton Architectural Press

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Books by Jennifer Bloomer