Following Italy's unification in 1861, architects, artists, politicians, and literati engaged in volatile debates over the pursuit of national and regional identity. Growing industrialization and urbanization across the country contrasted with the rediscovery of traditionally built forms and objects created by the agrarian peasantry. Pride in Modesty argues that these ordinary, often anonymous, everyday things inspired and transformed Italian art and architecture from the 1920s through the 1970s.Through in-depth examinations of texts, drawings, and buildings, Michelangelo Sabatino finds that the folk traditions of the pre-industrial countryside have provided formal, practical, and poetic inspiration directly affecting both design and construction practices over a period of sixty years and a number of different political regimes. This surprising continuity allows Sabatino to reject the division of Italian history into sharply delimited periods such as Fascist Interwar and Democratic Postwar and to instead emphasize the long, continuous process that transformed pastoral and urban ideals into a new, modernist Italy.

Pride in Modesty: Modernist Architecture and the Vernacular Tradition in Italy (Toronto Italian Studies)

History

Sabatino, Michelangelo

Europe

University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division

Following Italy's unification in 1861, architects, artists, politicians, and literati engaged in volatile debates over the pursuit of national and regional identity. Growing industrialization and urbanization across the country contrasted with the rediscovery of traditionally built forms and objects created by the agrarian peasantry. Pride in Modesty argues that these ordinary, often anonymous, everyday things inspired and transformed Italian art and architecture from the 1920s through the 1970s.
Through in-depth examinations of texts, drawings, and buildings, Michelangelo Sabatino finds that the folk traditions of the pre-industrial countryside have provided formal, practical, and poetic inspiration directly affecting both design and construction practices over a period of sixty years and a number of different political regimes. This surprising continuity allows Sabatino to reject the division of Italian history into sharply delimited periods such as Fascist Interwar and Democratic Postwar and to instead emphasize the long, continuous process that transformed pastoral and urban ideals into a new, modernist Italy.

Pride in Modesty: Modernist Architecture and the Vernacular Tradition in Italy

University of Toronto Press

Boasting to everyone that his forum would be grander than the Colosseum, Mussolini created the Stadio dei Marmi, or Stadium of Statues, an arena built outside Rome for the 1944 Olympic Games that were postponed by World War II. Believing a fascist state required the top level of physical fitness, Il Duce provided inspiration for his nation in the form of monumental art, commissioning sculptors from all over the country to create sixty Herculean statues of white marble to be put atop six-foot pedestals surrounding the stadium. The statues, based on figures from Italian war memorials, embodied the glorification of the athlete and the mannered heroism of the soldier. Startlingly erotic and poetic, each statue stands twelve feet tall, nude but for the occasional headband or sandals. So blatant was their sexual presence that the statues later provoked furtive attempts at “decency” involving fig leaves and loincloths. Once relegated to the category of political kitsch, these statues have, in recent times, been re-evaluated and are being recognized as objects of beauty and merit. “The Foro Italico…sustains a guileless, perhaps unique, male eroticism which is at odds with the grandiloquent intentions of its planner and creators in Mussolini’s fascist regime,” explains George Mott, who first glimpsed the statues in 1962 and photographed them twenty years later. His black-and-white and color images of the statues have been sought by collectors in Europe and America, and have been used repeatedly by fashion designers and art directors. In Foro Italico, for the first time, these photographs are being shown collectively, exquisitely reproduced in a remarkable, deluxe, slip-cased edition that includes an introduction by Giorgio Armani, himself a connoisseur of 1930s art and architecture.

Foro Italico

Arts & Photography

Ballerini, Luigi

History & Criticism

powerHouse Books

The first survey of the classic twentieth-century houses that defined American Midwestern modernism. Famed as the birthplace of that icon of twentieth-century architecture, the skyscraper, Chicago also cultivated a more humble but no less consequential form of modernism--the private residence. Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929-75 explores the substantial yet overlooked role that Chicago and its suburbs played in the development of the modern single-family house in the twentieth century. In a city often associated with the outsize reputations of Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the examples discussed in this generously illustrated book expand and enrich the story of the region's built environment. Authors Susan Benjamin and Michelangelo Sabatino survey dozens of influential houses by architects whose contributions are ripe for reappraisal, such as Paul Schweikher, Harry Weese, Keck &amp; Keck, and William Pereira. From the bold, early example of the "Battledeck House" by Henry Dubin (1930) to John Vinci and Lawrence Kenny's gem the Freeark House (1975), the generation-spanning residences discussed here reveal how these architects contended with climate and natural setting while negotiating the dominant influences of Wright and Mies. They also reveal how residential clients--typically middle-class professionals, progressive in their thinking--helped to trailblaze modern architecture in America. Though reflecting different approaches to site, space, structure, and materials, the examples in Modern in the Middle reveal an abundance of astonishing houses that have never been collected into one study--until now.

Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929-75

BENJAMIN, Susan

Americas

The Monacelli Press

The comprehensive story of an icon of modern architecture: the Edith Farnsworth House, designed by Mies van der Rohe One of the most famous residences in modern history, a glass and steel marvel that seems to float above its site, the Edith Farnsworth House had been legendary in the public imagination long before it could be widely accessed. This book charts the house's original design by Mies van der Rohe and periods of neglect, flooding, and new ownership by Lord Peter Palumbo. Now publicly accessible and celebrating twenty years of being owned and administered by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, this icon of modern architecture commissioned by client and patron Edith Farnsworth now gets its due. The Edith Farnsworth House is one of the most prized residences in modern architectural history, whose sometimes fraught history culminates in its publicly accessible life today. The book, which newly foregrounds the key role of client Edith Farnsworth, is written and edited by Michelangelo Sabatino, who contributes deep expertise on modernist architecture, and includes an essay by architectural historian Dietrich Neumann, excerpts of Edith Farnsworth's unpublished memoir, as well as interviews with Mies's grandson Dirk Lohan, and the house's second owner, Lord Peter Palumbo. Published in association with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, this book is published is a trove of cultural and visual history, and includes photographs by Hedrich Blessing, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Annie Leibovitz, in addition to documentation of cultural collaborations with artists, designers, and performance troupes such as Virgil Abloh, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, and Gerard & Kelly.

The Edith Farnsworth House: Architecture, Preservation, Culture

Canada is a country of massive size, of diverse geographical features and an equally diverse population—all features that are magnificently reflected in its architecture. In this book, Rhodri Windsor Liscombe  and Michelangelo Sabatino offer a richly informative history of Canadian architecture that celebrates and explores the country’s many contributions to the spread of architectural modernity in the Americas.             A distinct Canadian design attitude coalesced during the twentieth century, one informed by a liberal, hybrid, and pragmatic mindset intent less upon the dogma of architectural language and more on thinking about the formation of inclusive spaces and places. Taking a fresh perspective on design production, they map the unfolding of architectural modernity across the country, from the completion of the transcontinental railway in the late 1880s through to the present. Along the way they discuss architecture within the broader contexts of political, industrial, and sociocultural evolution; the urban-suburban expansion; and new building technologies. Examining the works of architects and firms such as ARCOP, Eric Arthur, Ernest Cormier, Brigitte Shim, and Howard Sutcliffe, this book brings Canadian architecture chronologically and thematically to life.  

Canada: Modern Architectures in History

Liscombe, Rhodri Windsor

Photography & Video

Reaktion Books

Modern, Again: The Benda House & Garden in Chicagoland is equal parts a history of modern residential architecture in America and a rewarding journey of preservation and stewardship. Ambrose and Sabatino--co-authors of this book and co-owners of the Winston Elting designed Benda house--summarize their in-depth archival research and hands-on work undertaken for the restoration of their 1939 International Style house in Riverside, a historic village designed by Olmsted & Vaux in Chicago's western suburbs. The Benda House was commissioned during a time when excitement for modern architecture, art, and design was very much alive amongst the public in America, partly due to the enthusiasm created by Chicago's Century of Progress International Exposition held between 1933 and 1934 and culminated with the New York World's Fair of 1939. This book features archival materials ranging from architectural drawings to historic building product catalogues alongside contemporary photographs taken before and after the restoration process. Finally, the co-authors discuss their addition of a new landscaped garden that re-establishes the relationship between nature and this modern house while extending Olmsted's vision of idealized suburban living in America.

Modern, Again: The Benda House & Garden in Chicagoland

Ambrose, Serge

Architecture

ORO Editions

<div>Italian architect and designer Carlo Mollino (1905-73) is known to many for his furniture designs. Although none of Mollino's designs were mass-produced, they command high prices among collectors of twentieth-century furniture and are part of the collections of major design museums. Others recall Mollino for his large secret stash of erotic Polaroids, taken throughout the 1960s and recovered among his personal effects after his death. The risqué photos have been the subject of several exhibitions and have inspired fashion designers, including Jeremy Scott, who drew on them when creating a recent collection for Moschino. Much less attention has been devoted to Mollino's contribution to architecture. With Carlo Mollino: Architect and Storyteller, Napoleone Ferrari and Michelangelo Sabatino offer the first carefully researched and comprehensive study of Mollino's architectural work. Drawing on rich archival materials, as well as Mollino's own writings, they argue persuasively that, while Mollino realized relatively few projects, his contributions to architecture--and, in particular, the modernist movement--are both significant and distinctive due to Mollino's strong affinity with surrealism. The book features both built and unrealized projects, including masterpieces like the Teatro Regio and the Torino Chamber of Commerce and early, lesser-known works like the Torino Horse Riding Club and the Lago Negro chairlift station in the Italian Alps. Lavish illustrations and essays by Ferrari and Sabatino round out this overdue tribute to an extraordinary personality of twentieth-century architecture. &nbsp;</div>

Carlo Mollino: Architect and Storyteller

Ferrari, Napoleone

Park Books

The Berlin-based photo artist Arina Dähnick follows in the footsteps of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in her study of city life and urbanity, the contrasts of inside and outside, of blurriness and focus, reflections and mirror images, and plays with the viewer’s perception. She discovered van der Rohe's architecture in the fall of 2012, when, after a thunderstorm, she perceived the Neue Nationalgalerie in a both fascinating and paradoxical spatial experience of boundless vastness—and a simultaneous feeling of being held. From then on she photographed the building under various conditions until its closure in 2015, following in Mies van der Rohe’s footsteps from Berlin to Brno, from Chicago to New York. She captured his most famous buildings—including the Villa Tugendhat, the Seagram Building, and the Lake Shore Drive Apartments—in impressive photo series that conveys her creative inspiration as well as the fascinating spatial experience of the architecture itself. Architectural Portraits. The MIES Project will be presented at the S. R. Crown Hall and the Goethe Institut in 2019, in parallel with this year’s edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial. The exhibition will subsequently travel to Barcelona, Brno, and Berlin.

Arina Daehnick: Architectural Portraits. The Mies Project

Lohan, Dirk

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