A fundamental tenet of the historiography of modern architecture holds that cubism forged a vital link between avant-garde practices in early twentieth-century painting and architecture. This collection of essays, commissioned by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, takes a close look at that widely accepted but little scrutinized belief. In the first historically focused examination of the issue, the volume returns to the original site of cubist art in pre-World War I Europe and proceeds to examine the historical, theoretical, and socio-political relationships between avant-garde practices in painting, architecture, and other cultural forms, including poetry, landscape, and the decorative arts. The essays look at works produced in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Czechoslovakia during the early decades of the twentieth century.Together, the essays show that although there were many points of intersection -- historical, metaphorical, theoretical, and ideological -- between cubism and architecture, there was no simple, direct link between them. Most often the connections between cubist painting and modern architecture were construed analogically, by reference to shared formal qualities such as fragmentation, spatial ambiguity, transparency, and multiplicity; or to techniques used in other media such as film, poetry, and photomontage. Cubist space itself remained two-dimensional; with the exception of Le Cobusiers work, it was never translated into the three dimensions of architecture. Cubism's significance for architecture also remained two-dimensional -- a method of representing modern spatial experience through the ordering impulses of art.Copublished with the Canadian Centre for Architecture/CentreCanadien d'Architecture (view table of contents)

Product Description: This is a study on the explosion of architectural ideas during the last decades of the Hapsburg Empire and in the first years of the new republics of Central Europe. Despite the cultural battleground of competing linguistic, ethnic, religious and natural traditions and aspirations, the region was nevertheless host to a persistent cosmopolitan ideal...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In this book, Eve Blau looks at how ideological conflict shapedthe buildings of Red Vienna―in terms of their program, spatialconception, language, and use―as well as how political meaning itselfis manifested in architecture.In 1919 the Social Democrat city council of Vienna initiated a radical program of reforms designed to reshape the city's infrastructure along socialist lines...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

The Description for this book, Ruskinian Gothic: The Architecture of Deane and Woodward, 1845-1861, will be forthcoming.