pp. 346. heavy book additional postage will apply "Antoni Gaudi (1852-1928) was a builder by instinct and by practice, fanciful and baroque in his sensibility, in love with the bright colours and plastic forms of the Mediterranean tradition. Despite his considerable contributions, Gaudi was an isolated figure in the architecture of the modern era. Critics…

Antoni Gaudi 1852-1926 Electa Architecture

Arts & Photography

Lahuerta, Juan José

Architecture

Phaidon Press

This beautifully illustrated book, the catalog for an exhibition on view at the National Museum of Art of Catalonia in Barcelona and coorganized with the Picasso Museum in Paris, explores important affinities between Picasso and Romanesque art. Using two key moments as starting points, Juan José Lahuerta and Emilia Philippot first discuss the summer of 1906, when Picasso stayed in the village of Gòsol in the Catalan Pyrenees, and then turn to 1934, as he visited the Romanesque art collections of what is today the National Museum of Art of Catalonia. Picasso’s discovery of the Romanesque nurtured his interest in other “primitive” or ethnographic art, later echoed in such decisive works as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Importantly, while Lahuerta and Philippot avoid any attempt to trace direct Romanesque influences on Picasso—as they note, his work consistently escapes such linear accounts—they do demonstrate that Picasso’s interest in the twelfth-century sculpture Virgin from Gósol, his lifelong fascination with the theme of the crucifixion, and his study of the skull all reflect elements that were also of major importance in Romanesque art and architecture. What these shared features allow, Lahuerta and Philippot ultimately argue, is not only a richer understanding of Picasso’s work, but also a rediscovering and reinvention of Romanesque art in our contemporary moment, causing the medieval to become refreshingly and paradoxically modern.

Romanesque - Picasso

Philippot, Emilia

History & Criticism

Tenov Books

Gaudí

Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya

Discover the Casa Batllo, the famous house of Gaudi in Barcelona, with this coffee table book that contains a lot of colourful pictures. Published by Triangle Postals, this book is good start for a future journey or great gift to offer.

Casa Batlló

Triangle Books

Antoni Gaudí, 1852-1926: Arquitectura, ideología y política (Spanish Edition)

Photography & Video

Electa

Columns of Smoke is a four-volume collection. The first volume includes “Photography or Life” and “Popular Mies,” which illuminate overlooked aspects of modern architecture and photography and reveal a more nuanced—and plausible—conception of the modern world. In “Photography or Life,” Juan José Lahuerta contrasts well-known images tied to the history of twentieth-century architecture with anonymous graphic materials and pictures from the popular press. In doing so, he demonstrates that pointing a camera at a building is neither natural nor innocent—it involves deliberate and telling decisions. His analysis of the work of Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, for example, suggests irreconcilable differences between the two architects that represent radically opposed approaches to architecture and life. Furthermore, a close study of snapshots of Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus building taken by teachers and students leads to new ways of understanding the myths associated with the Dessau school. Using the same method in “Popular Mies,” Lahuerta looks at photographs of architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s work and shows that Mies was influenced not only by Stieglitz and Camera Work, but also a mass culture that enjoyed zeppelins, music halls, x-rays, and phantasmagorical gadgets. At the same time, in their portrayals of Mies’s work, the press and anonymous photographers situated it in a popular context that stands as a counterpoint to the notion of a heroic modern era. This first volume of Columns of Smoke is a brilliant treatment of modern visual culture that will redefine our concept of modernity.

Photography or Life / Popular Mies: Columns of Smoke, Volume 1

In his Columns of Smoke series, Juan José Lahuerta takes on the enormously ambitious task of re-reading modernity, offering us fresh ways of looking at it while drawing new links between the ideas of architecture and ornamentation, with a special focus on how they have been treated in print. While the first volume of Columns of Smoke considered epoch-making architect Adolf Loos’s relationship with photography, here Lahuerta turns to the Classical strand in Loos’s architecture and to his written work—and specifically his engagement with architectural and artistic theory. Lahuerta pays particular attention to Loos’s seminal “Ornament and Crime,” the essay that established disornamentation as the signal feature of twentieth-century architecture. Through close analysis of that essay he unearths the racially charged, pseudoscientific ideas from early anthropology that underpin Loos’s thinking. Sure to be controversial, this new reading of Loos’s landmark writings calls the whole disornamentation project into question, and in the process, it reveals a radically new perspective on a major turn in modern design and culture.

On Loos, Ornament and Crime: Columns of Smoke: Volume II

Juan José Lahuerta’s Columns of Smoke series offers bold new readings of modernity and its key figures while redefining the connections between architecture, ornamentation, and the portrayal of both in print media. The third volume focuses on the Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926), whose spectacular fin-de-siècle bohemian modernism stood in revolutionary contrast to the leading approaches of the day. With the rise of Le Corbusier’s modern style of architecture in the early twentieth century, architects who favored ornamentation and a strong bond with nature, like Gaudí, were relegated to the sidelines. Lahuerta draws on first-hand documents, many previously unpublished, to show that Gaudí, far from being the isolated eccentric seen in other accounts, was keenly aware of the major theories and works of his time and cleverly used industrial processes to produce ornamental details that appear today to be almost handmade. Equally impressive was Gaudí’s ability to capitalize on his fame once in the public eye, as both the architect and his buildings appeared in illustrations in the popular press. His influence on avant-garde artists like Salvador Dalí, who admired the edible appearance of Gaudí’s Casa Milà in Barcelona, and Pablo Picasso, who was fascinated by the eroticism of the Casa Batlló, attests to the architect’s impact far beyond his field. Richly illustrated with rare images from a variety of sources, this highly visual take on Gaudí is also a spirited commentary on the roots of modernism more generally. Entertaining and perceptive, Antoni Gaudí challenges us to reconsider what we thought we knew about this pioneering architect and his distinctive work.

Antoni Gaudí: Ornament, Fire and Ashes (Volume 3) (Columns of Smoke)

The expert contributors to this lavishly illustrated volume, devoted entirely to Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion of 1929, address here for the first time the forgotten contexts of the Pavilion’s genesis. Habitually thought of as an abstract, unpolluted, and splendidly isolated building—a precursor of Mies’s American period—the Pavilion is revealed here as a thoroughly European work, perhaps less pristine but more authentic. Mies and Lilly Reich were commissioned to design not only the Pavilion but also more than one hundred thousand square feet of German stands spread throughout the Exposition. By examining that work in addition to the Pavilion itself, the contributors present a far-reaching reinterpretation of the whole. They also explore connections with the mass media, highlight the work’s antecedents and meaning in the history of architecture, and analyze the current pavilion, a reconstruction of the original built in 1986. No other critical study offers a comparable overview of Mies’s work in Barcelona.

Mies van der Rohe: Barcelona-1929

Capdevila-Werning, Remei

Colomina, Beatriz

Martínez De Guereñu, Laura

Neumann, Dietrich

Neumeyer, Fritz

Papapetros, Spyros

Robbers, Lutz

Rodríguez Pedret, Carmen

Adolf Loos held that a building should have a soberly discreet exterior, reserving all its riches for its interior. Given that, any real appreciation of the spatial complexity of the work of one of the most misunderstood architects of the twentieth century requires engagement with his interiors, which this book does, brilliantly. In marked contrast to his contemporaries in the Vienna Secession, who designed their spaces down to the smallest detail, Loos presented himself as a “professor of interior design,” perfectly willing to adapt to the habits and tastes of his clients, inviting them to embrace their own tastelessness rather than defer to the discernment of an “aesthete” architect. Together with the future occupant, he designed welcoming interiors whose warmth came from the effective use of quality materials and the creation of a flowing continuity articulated by the furnishings. What Loos created thereby was not merely architecture, but a new culture of living.

Adolf Loos: Private Spaces

Ottillinger, Eva B.

Parcerisas, Pilar

Long, Christopher

Kristan, Markus

Kühn, Christian

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