Jeffrey Kipnis

Architecture with and Without Le Corbusier documents two architectural masterpieces: the Church at Firminy and The Miller House. The church is a late work by Le Corbusier that was left unfinished for 40 years. José Oubrerie, a protégé of the great master who had worked on the project from its inception, completed and built the canonical work, adapting it to current needs and standards while respecting the integrity of the original design. The Miller House, Oubrerie’s own late masterpiece from the 90s, is a landmark in Lexington where the architect devotes his mature years to academic leadership at the University of Kentucky. It is firmly on its way to securing a permanent place in the modernist canon. The thorough documentation of the two buildings with an extensive collection of previously unpublished drawings, documents and photographs builds a precise and vivid testimony of Oubrerie’s unique architectural trajectory with Le Corbusier’s formidable legacy as a formative and creative influence. The two seminal works, presented side by side with commentary by George Ranalli and Kenneth Frampton yield insight into the evolution and current resonance of modernist architecture in a story that spans two worlds and two distinguished careers. A collaboration between the City College of New York • Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture and Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers

Essays on contemporary architecture that are less about making critical judgments than about explication, exegesis, and provocation.Jeffrey Kipnis's writing, thinking, and teaching casts architecture as both an intellectual discourse and a lived, affective experience. His essays on contemporary architects are less about making critical judgments than about explication, exegesis, and provocation. In these eleven essays, written between 1990 and 2008, he considers projects, concepts, and buildings by some of the most recognized architects working today, with special attention to the productions of affect. He explores "intuition" in the work of Morphosis, "exhilaration" in Coop Himmelb(l)au, "freedom" in the work of Rem Koolhaas and OMA, "magic" in Steven Holl's buildings, and "anxiety" in Rafael Moneo's writing about contemporary architecture. Kipnis's deft integration of art, critical theory, philosophy, pop culture, classical music, and science-what the volume's editor Alexander Maymind calls "ancillary material"-into a rigorous architectural theory and criticism makes A Question of Qualities an exemplar of a new way to write about architecture. It is also a distinct pleasure to read. Kipnis transcends the fractious intellectual climate in architecture, stepping outside the boundaries mandated by the vast specialized criteria that the discipline now claims to address. The essays in this volume demonstrate a style of writing that is not so much about architecture as it is an affect of architecture itself.

This monograph will not only provide exhaustive documentation of O-14's design and construction but delves further into the complex interrelationships this architectural model weaves between technology, expression and politics in the context of the 'nowhere place' of the global city. The book is both an account of a design's realisation and a manifesto, and contains Jesse Reiser's explanatory and theoretical texts on the tower as well as a number of critical essays.