Winner, Alice Davis Hitchcock Award, Society of Architectural Historians. The work of the French architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux has fascinated art historians, social critics, and architects alike since the French Revolution. Criticized in his own time for extravagance and megalomania, Ledoux has since been hailed as a visionary and utopian, and as a radical neoclassicist. In the 1930s Ledoux's designs were seen as anticipating modernist abstraction in architecture, and more recently they have been mined as a source of postmodern imagery. A product of detailed research into late-eighteenth-century cultural and social history, this book examines the controversial architect's life and work in the context of the Revolutionary period. It discusses Ledoux's education, early career, and the development of his personal idiom as a domestic architect. Vidler analyzes what was, perhaps, the most significant of Ledoux's public works, the Saline de Chaux, one of the most celebrated factory towns of its time and the only work of Ledoux to survive at the scale of its conception. The building of this rural factory, in conjunction with its proposed social and technical program, serves as a case study of Ledoux's early speculations on the relationship of architecture to industrial management. Ledoux was deeply involved in urban projects as well, and Vidler studies a number of them - most notably, the Palace of Justice of Aix-en-Provence, the Theater of Besançon, and the tollgates around Paris - as examples of Ledoux's attempt to create a "modern classicism" that would reinvest ancient forms with contemporary meaning and ultimately fashion an aesthetic for the representation of the public realm In the book's final section, Vidler turns to the more explicitly utopian designs that Ledoux proposed for the "Ideal City of Chaux," which he imagined growing up around the saltworks in France-Comté. It was an entire city of symbolic and functional institutions, and Ledoux invented an architectural language to express their social and moral significance. Anthony Vidler is Professor of Architecture at Princeton University, where he also directs the European Cultural Studies Program.

Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Architecture and Social Reform at the End of the Ancient Regime

Arts & Photography

Vidler, Anthony

Architecture

Mit Pr

The Architectural Uncanny presents an engaging and original series of meditations on issues and figures that are at the heart of the most pressing debates surrounding architecture today. Anthony Vidler interprets contemporary buildings and projects in light of the resurgent interest in the uncanny as a metaphor for a fundamentally "unhomely" modern condition. The essays are at once historical - serving to situate contemporary discourse in its own intellectual tradition and theoretical - opening up the complex and difficult relationships between politics, social thought, and architectural design in an era when the reality of homelessness and the idealism of the neo-avant-garde have never seemed so far apart.  Vidler, one of the deftest and surest critics of the contemporary scene, explores aspects of architecture through notions of the uncanny as they have been developed in literature, philosophy, and psychology from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present. He interprets the unsettling qualities of today's architecture - its fragmented neo-constructivist forms reminiscent of dismembered bodies, its "seeing walls" replicating the passive gaze of domestic cyborgs, its historical monuments indistinguishable from glossy reproductions - in the light of modern reflection on questions of social and individual estrangement, alienation, exile, and homelessness.  Focusing on the work of architects such as Bernard Tschumi, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Coop Himmelblau, John Hejduk, Elizabeth Diller, and Ricardo Scofidio, as well as theorists of the urban condition, Vidler delineates the problems and paradoxes associated with the subject of domesticity.  Anthony Vidler is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Architecture at Princeton University. His most recent book is Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Architecture and Social Reform at the End of the Ancien Régime.

The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely

Anthony Vidler interprets contemporary buildings and projects in light of the resurgent interest in the uncanny as a metaphor for a fundamentally "unhomely" modern condition.
The Architectural Uncanny presents an engaging and original series of meditations on issues and figures that are at the heart of the most pressing debates surrounding architecture today. Anthony Vidler interprets contemporary buildings and projects in light of the resurgent interest in the uncanny as a metaphor for a fundamentally "unhomely" modern condition. The essays are at once historical―serving to situate contemporary discourse in its own intellectual tradition and theoretical―opening up the complex and difficult relationships between politics, social thought, and architectural design in an era when the reality of homelessness and the idealism of the neo-avant-garde have never seemed so far apart.
Vidler, one of the deftest and surest critics of the contemporary scene, explores aspects of architecture through notions of the uncanny as they have been developed in literature, philosophy, and psychology from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present. He interprets the unsettling qualities of today's architecture―its fragmented neo-constructivist forms reminiscent of dismembered bodies, its "seeing walls" replicating the passive gaze of domestic cyborgs, its historical monuments indistinguishable from glossy reproductions - in the light of modern reflection on questions of social and individual estrangement, alienation, exile, and homelessness.
Focusing on the work of architects such as Bernard Tschumi, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Coop Himmelblau, John Hejduk, Elizabeth Diller, and Ricardo Scofidio, as well as theorists of the urban condition, Vidler delineates the problems and paradoxes associated with the subject of domesticity.

The MIT Press

How psychological ideas of space have profoundly affected architectural and artistic expression in the twentieth century.
Beginning with agoraphobia and claustrophobia in the late nineteenth century, followed by shell shock and panic fear after World War I, phobias and anxiety came to be seen as the mental condition of modern life. They became incorporated into the media and arts, in particular the spatial arts of architecture, urbanism, and film. This "spatial warping" is now being reshaped by digitalization and virtual reality. Anthony Vidler is concerned with two forms of warped space. The first, a psychological space, is the repository of neuroses and phobias. This space is not empty but full of disturbing forms, including those of architecture and the city. The second kind of warping is produced when artists break the boundaries of genre to depict space in new ways. Vidler traces the emergence of a psychological idea of space from Pascal and Freud to the identification of agoraphobia and claustrophobia in the nineteenth century to twentieth-century theories of spatial alienation and estrangement in the writings of Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin. Focusing on current conditions of displacement and placelessness, he examines ways in which contemporary artists and architects have produced new forms of spatial warping. The discussion ranges from theorists such as Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze to artists such as Vito Acconci, Mike Kelley, Martha Rosler, and Rachel Whiteread. Finally, Vidler looks at the architectural experiments of Frank Gehry, Coop Himmelblau, Daniel Libeskind, Greg Lynn, Morphosis, and Eric Owen Moss in the light of new digital techniques that, while relying on traditional perspective, have radically transformed the composition, production, and experience―perhaps even the subject itself―of architecture.

Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture

History & Criticism

MIT Press]

An in-depth exploration of the design process and teaching methods of the remarkable British architect as revealed by the archives of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal The British architect James Frazer Stirling (1924–1992) stimulated impassioned responses among both supporters and detractors, and he continues to be the subject of fierce debate. He earned international renown through such innovative—and frequently controversial—projects as the Leicester University Engineering Building (1959–63); the History Faculty building at Cambridge University (1964–67); the Neue Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart (1977–84); the Clore Gallery at Tate Britain (1984); and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard University (1979–84). Stirling was also a visiting professor at the Yale School of Architecture, where he trained and influenced many of the current leaders in the field.
Fully illustrated with previously unpublished documents and new photography from the James Stirling/Michael Wilford Archive at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, this book allows for a close examination of design drawings, photographs, and models spanning Stirling’s entire career. These materials deepen our understanding of the influences, early formation, approach, and process of an architect whose work resists labeling. Filled with in-depth analytical and critical presentations of exemplary projects and their reception, the volume reveals Stirling to be a remarkably informed and consistent thinker and writer on architecture.

James Frazer Stirling: Notes from the Archive

Yale University Press

The Writing of the Walls: Architectural Theory in the Late Enlightenment

Princeton Architectural Press

A summary of the ideas and buildings of the period before the French Revolution with particular reference to the roots of modern architecture. The author redefines the relationship between architecture and society during the period and looks at the reactions of contemporary architects.

Toba Khedoori (Focus Series)

Smith, Elizabeth A.

Ram Pubns & Dist

Employing such decorative elements as scrolls, arrows and patterns, Los Angeles-based Lari Pittman--one of the most influential and challenging voices in contemporary painting--expertly directs our eye through his busy constellations of fragmented imagery (landscapes, domestic interiors, roots, flames, rope, spiderwebs), cobbling together a truly unique language. Critic Alex Farquharson has noted that Pittman's work is cut up, overlayered and elaborately stylized... The very excess of imagery in the paintings, and the innumerable narratives they spark off, has the comparable effect of flattening illusionistic depth. This echoes the horizontal sprawl of L.A.'s diverse communities, and the pluralistic languages of commerce and dwelling with which each gives its pitch and establishes its patch. This collection of works from 2005 to 2008 features texts by independent curator and writer Klaus Kertess and Anthony Vidler, Dean and Professor at The Cooper Union School of Architecture.

Lari Pittman: Paintings and Works on Paper: 2005-2008

Kertess,klaus

Individual Artists

atle Gerhardsen/gladstone Gallery/Regen Projects

Anthony Vidler, an internationally recognized scholar, theorist, and critic of modern and contemporary architecture, is widely known for his essays on the most pressing issues and debates in the field. This volume brings together a collection of such writings—including the iconic, long unavailable “Scenes of the Street”—into one volume. Scenes of the Street and Other Essays showcases Vidler’s engaging and accessible expertise on both contemporary and historic subjects that are relevant to today's concerns. “Scenes of the Street,” a multi-faceted analysis of city planning is one such example; other essays in this volume include “Unknown Lands: Guy Debord and the Cartographies of a Landscape to be Invented,” “Transparency and Utopia: Constructing the Void from Pascal to Foucault,” and “The Modern Acropolis: Tony Garnier from La Cité Antique to the Cité Industrielle.” Vidler writes in his introduction: In the following essays, I have interrogated the struggle for an urban architecture in the modern period, its critiques and aspirations, in the belief that understanding the historical dimensions of the debate will lead to a renewal of interest in an architecture calculated to redeem, if only partially, our “planet of slums” and its deteriorating environment; an interest that will not simply reject “utopia” out of hand or fall back into the complacencies of nostalgia. Written during a period in which the debates themselves were actively engaged by critics and supporters of modernism, they reflect contemporary issues as they search for their prehistory. As historical inquiries, they inevitably also engage the transformations in history writing itself since 1970, intellectual responses to the social and political conditions of postwar modernity. This fascinating series of essays on issues and figures is an invaluable resource for architects and art historians and enthusiasts of structure and substance alike.

The Scenes of the Street and Other Essays

The Monacelli Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Vidler, Anthony. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Vidler, Anthony

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Vidler, Anthony. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Architecture and Social Reform at the End of the Ancient Regime

The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely

The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely

Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture

James Frazer Stirling: Notes from the Archive

The Writing of the Walls: Architectural Theory in the Late Enlightenment

The Writing of the Walls: Architectural Theory in the Late Enlightenment

Toba Khedoori (Focus Series)

Lari Pittman: Paintings and Works on Paper: 2005-2008

The Scenes of the Street and Other Essays