Barry Bergdoll

The first major retrospective of the Brazilian modernist architect's life and work One of the most important architects of the twentieth century, Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992) was remarkably prolific and intriguingly idiosyncratic. A participant in the efforts to reshape Italian culture in her youth, Bo Bardi immigrated to Brazil in 1946, where her practice evolved within the social and cultural realities of her adopted country. While she continued to work with industrial materials, she added simple building techniques and naturalistic forms to her designs, striving to create large, multiuse spaces that promoted public life.Lina Bo Bardi is the first comprehensive study of the architect’s life and work. Author Zeuler Lima, the leading authority on Bo Bardi, presents her activities on two continents, examining how ethical and social considerations influenced her intellectual engagement with modern architecture and providing an indispensable guide to her writings and her experimental, iconic designs.

This beautifully illustrated publication celebrates the first-ever restoration of the exterior of J. Pierpont Morgan’s Library — the historic heart of the Morgan Library & Museum. Morgan’s Library has stood as a significant cultural landmark ever since it was commissioned by J. Pierpont Morgan for personal use at the start of the 20th century. Its transition to a public institution in the twenties has lent to an even greater flood of admiration and patronage, by both local and international audiences. The elegant design by Charles Follen McKim stands as one of the finest examples of neoclassical architecture in the United States, significant for its distinctive Italian Renaissance style and its opulent interior period rooms. The site has been designated both a National Historic Landmark and a New York City landmark, and it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The book, following on the heels of the completed restoration, will punctuate this latest milestone in the building’s storied history.

Famously labelled the father, poet, and prophet of green architecture and a vocal proponent of the idea that any project in architecture or design must present new or better ways of living or be deemed immoral, Emilio Ambasz is an award-winning architect, industrial designer, and protean maker of forms. He has invented highly efficient engines, modular furniture, streetlamps, flexible pens, expandable suitcases, ergonomic door handles, wrist-computers, dental hygiene systems, and 3D posters. He created the Vertebra chair, the first ever automatic, ergonomic chair in the world, now part of the permanent collections at MoMA and The Met in New York. In architecture he has long been a pioneer, and has retained a belief in the environment, or rather the larger ecology, as fundamental in viewing the world: as Professor Bergdoll notes of Ambasz in his introduction, his philosophy of green over gray may often have fallen on deaf ears at the height of Postmodernism, but it today seems profoundly relevant. And it is in the context of today that the book considers the work of Emilio Ambasz and its three main areas of concentration architecture, industrial design, curating with an aim of shining a light on the interdisciplinary nature of the work as a whole. Featuring built and manufactured designs that have achieved iconic fame and challenged others to approach new ways of reconciling architecture and nature notably the Prefectural Hall at Fukuoka, Japan, and the conservatory buildings of the San Antonio Botanical Garden, in addition to his own unique house outside Seville in Spain the book also considers Ambasz s work as curator at MoMA and his ongoing influence and legacy.

"… a selection of the practice’s nearly 400 projects, tracing how three generations of Madalenos successively responded to their respective era’s challenges while maintaining a consistent, and uniquely Mexican, architectural identity." — Architectural Record In its 85th year of existence, the architectural practice founded in 1937 by a very young Juan Sordo Madaleno, has decided to publish this unconventional monograph which compiles the most ambitious projects built (and not built) within the context of the transformation, and which at the same time reflect and determine the evolution urban and rural landscapes of post-revolutionary Mexico. From the very first constructions, the firm has been a pioneer not only in the erection of modern buildings, but also in inherently urban architectural designs, fundamental components of overlapping urban scales. This book includes contributions from some of the leading thinkers in urban architecture today, highlighting the commitment that has guided a unique family of architects for three generations.

Mid-March 2020: native New Yorker Gregory Peterson is on an early evening walk through the city, suddenly shut down by the coronavirus pandemic. Manhattan’s grand public spaces are bare. The monumental Lincoln Center Plaza is empty. The sounds of skates on ice and bustle of tourists and workers at Rockefeller Center are absent. Not a soul on Easter Sunday at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. Starkly silent, the city is stilled, as no one had ever seen it before. Travelling on foot and by bike to avoid public transportation, Peterson took more than 400 photographs of over 200 locations in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens through the spring and summer of 2020. Using his iPhone 11, he captured myriad surreal landmarks - the United Nations Secretariat with no traffic, people, or flags, Grand Central Terminal without a person or even a car in sight, as well as gelled neighbourhood streets, churches, shops, and other tourist destinations. Without people, these photos reveal the city’s primeval soul. They unveil a serene beauty most often obscured by the frenzy of our fast-paced lives. We see New York with new eyes.

A book dedicated to the newly constructed expansion of the Kennedy Center that provides a new topology for performing-arts centers and a view of how art is made, designed by one of America’s most influential architects.As the first major expansion in Kennedy Center history, the REACH breaks down boundaries between audience and art. Set adjacent to the Kennedy Center along the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., the REACH is set to open in 2019. As a “living memorial” for John F. Kennedy, the Center for the Performing Arts takes an active position among the great presidential monuments of the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials. Steven Holl Architects envisions the expansion of the building to fuse with the landscape and river, connecting the Kennedy Center to the Potomac riverfront for the first time: walk through a grove of thirty-five ginkgo trees, watch a free outdoor simulcast performance projected on a wall in a public park, or look out at the Potomac from a river pavilion café. The book offers a comprehensive look at the history of the project and includes programming initiatives by the Kennedy Center to memorialize President Kennedy and his significant contribution to the arts and American culture.

In 1955 The Museum of Modern Art staged Latin American Architecture since 1945, a landmark survey of modern architecture in Latin America. Published in conjunction with a new exhibition that revisits the region on the 60th anniversary of that important show, Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980 offers a complex overview of the positions, debates, and architectural creativity from Mexico and Cuba to the Southern Cone between 1955 and the early 1980s. The publication features a wealth of original materials that have never before been brought together to illustrate a period of self-questioning, exploration and complex political shifts that saw the emergence of the notion of Latin America as a landscape of development. Richly illustrated with architectural drawings, vintage photographs, sketches and newly commissioned photographs, the catalogue presents the work of architects who met the challenges of modernization with innovative formal, urbanistic and programmatic solutions. Today, when Latin America is again providing exciting and challenging architecture and urban responses, Latin America in Construction brings this vital post-war period to light.

Henri Labrouste is one of the few nineteenth-century architects consistently lionized as a precursor of modern architecture throughout the twentieth century and into our own time. The two magisterial glass-and-iron reading rooms he built in Paris gave form to the idea of the modern library as a collective civic space. His influence was both immediate and long-lasting, not only on the development of the modern library but also on the exploration of new paradigms of space, materials and luminosity in places of great public assembly. Published to accompany the first exhibition devoted to Labrouste in the United States--and the first anywhere in the world in nearly 40 years--this publication presents nearly 225 works in all media, including drawings, watercolors, vintage and modern photographs, film stills and architectural models. Essays by a range of international architecture scholars explore Labrouste's work and legacy through a variety of approaches.

Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream is an exploration of new architectural possibilities for American cities and suburbs in the aftermath of the recent foreclosure crisis in the United States. During the summer of 2011, five interdisciplinary teams of architects, urban planners, ecologists, engineers, and landscape designers were enlisted by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and MoMA PS1 to envision new housing infrastructures that could catalyze urban transformation, particularly in the country’s suburbs. Drawing on ideas proposed in The Buell Hypothesis, a research publication by Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, each team focused on a specific ‘mega region’, a metropolitan area between two major cities, to come up with inventive solutions for the future of housing and cities, to be exhibited at MoMA in Spring 2012. This publication presents each of these proposals in detail, through photographs, drawings, and renderings as well as interviews with the team leaders. With essays by Barry Bergdoll, MoMA’s Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, and Reinhold Martin, Director of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center, Foreclosed examines the relationship between land, infrastructures, and urban form in today’s cities and suburbs, and presents a potentially different future for housing in the United States.

This comprehensive examination of eighteenth and nineteenth-century architecture explores its extreme diversity within the context of tremendous social, economic and political upheaval. Bergdolls offers a penetrating analysis of the very ways issues of style functioned to make architecture one of the most vitally experimental of art forms in a period of sweeping political, social, and economic change. Never before had the functional requirements and expressive capacities of architecture been tested so thoroughly and with such diversity of invention. Bergdoll traces this experimentation in a broad range of contexts, focusing in particular on the relation of architectural design to new theories of history, new categories of scientific inquiry, and the broadening audience for architecture in this period of transformation. Unlike traditional surveys with long lists of buildings and architects, the themes are elucidated by in-depth coverage of key buildings which in turn are situated in both their local and European context.