Barry Bergdoll

Emerging Nature documents the work of the Argentinian architect, graphic designer and industrial designer Emilio Ambasz. The publication discusses his projects ranging from buildings and urban gardens including green facade vertical gardens to exhibition designs and everyday objects. The comprehensive volume features essays by various experts, interviews, a wealth of color photographs and drawings.

Ambasz’s main concern is to integrate nature and construction into architectural design, which is why he is regarded as one of the most important pioneers of Green Architecture. In his work a combination of landscape and architecture emerges, in which his respect for the environment and ecological sustainability becomes clear. A prime example of this is the Fukuoka Prefectural International Hall in Japan: a building that houses more than 100,000 m2 of exhibition spaces, theaters and offices is also an open green area in the form of a hanging garden.

The immense scope and diversity of Emilio Ambasz’ work is astounding. Besides architecture he has made a name for himself with the various objects he designs; they range from diesel engines and streetlights to portable TV players, fold-out watches and innovative office chairs. Emilio Ambasz followed his widespread interests and left traces in all the disciplines he crossed on his professional path.

Marcel Breuer (1902–81) is celebrated as a furniture designer, teacher and architect who changed the American house after his emigration from Hungary to the US in 1937. More recently historians, architects and—with the reopening in New York of the great megalith of his Whitney Museum as the Met Breuer—a larger public are gaining new insights into the cities and large-scale buildings Breuer planned. Often seen as a pioneer of a “Brutalist modernism” of reinforced concrete, Breuer might best be understood through the lens of the changing institutional structures in and for which he worked, a vantage developed in the fresh approaches gathered here in essays by a group of younger scholars. These essays draw on an abundance of newly available documents held in the Breuer Archive at Syracuse University, now accessible online.

The Bauhaus, the school of art and design founded in Germany in 1919 and shut down by the Nazis in 1933, brought together artists, architects and designers—among them Anni and Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, Lyonel Feininger, Walter Gropius, Johannes Itten, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Lilly Reich, Oskar Schlemmer, Gunta Stölzl—in an extraordinary conversation on the nature of art in the industrial age. Aiming to rethink the form of modern life, the Bauhaus became the site of a dazzling array of experiments in the visual arts that have profoundly shaped the world today.

Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity, originally published to accompany a major 2009 exhibition, is The Museum of Modern Art’s first comprehensive treatment of the subject since its famous Bauhaus exhibition of 1938, and offers a new generational perspective on the 20th century’s most influential experiment in artistic education. Organized in collaboration with the three major Bauhaus collections in Germany (the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau and the Klassic Stiftung Weimar), Bauhaus 1919–1933 examines the extraordinarily broad spectrum of the school’s products, including industrial design, furniture, architecture, graphics, photography, textiles, ceramics, theater and costume design, painting and sculpture.

Many of the objects discussed and illustrated here have rarely if ever been seen or published outside Germany. Featuring approximately 400 color plates, richly complemented by documentary images, Bauhaus 1919–1933 includes two overarching essays by the exhibition’s curators, Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, that present new perspectives on the Bauhaus. Shorter essays by more than 20 leading scholars apply contemporary viewpoints to 30 key Bauhaus objects, and an illustrated narrative chronology provides a dynamic glimpse of the Bauhaus’ lived history.

Between 1910 and 1965, influenced by Dada, Constructivism and De Stijl, the German-American modernist polymath Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) created numerous montages and collages that endure as fascinating illustrations of the design principles of his architecture. However, these works—most of them large-format—are much more than sketches merely intended to assist his creative process as an architect. They are works of art in their own right that demonstrate van der Rohe’s compositional vision in its purest form. Abrupt changes of viewpoint, freedom from perspective, place and time, montages of found elements and a focus on mixed media places him in the same context as his contemporaries Kurt Schwitters, Theo van Doesburg, Hans Richter and László Moholy-Nagy. This volume celebrates his lesser-known accomplishments in this medium.

Published for a major exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, this catalog reveals new perspectives on the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, a designer so prolific and familiar as to nearly preclude critical reexamination. Structured as a series of inquiries into the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives at Taliesin West, Arizona (recently acquired by MoMA and Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University), the book is a collection of scholarly explorations rather than an attempt to construct a master narrative. Each chapter centers on a key object from the archive that an invited author has “unpacked”— tracing its meanings and connections, and juxtaposing it with other works from the archive, from MoMA, or from outside collections. Wright’s quest to build a mile-high skyscraper reveals him to be one of the earliest celebrity architects, using television, press relations and other forms of mass media to advance his own self-crafted image. A little-known project for a Rosenwald School for African-American children, together with other projects that engage Japanese and Native American culture, ask provocative questions about Wright’s positions on race and cultural identity. Still other investigations engage the architect’s lifelong dedication to affordable and do-it-yourself housing, as well as the ecological systems, both social and environmental, that informed his approach to cities, landscapes and even ornament. The publication aims to open up Wright’s work to questions, interrogations and debates, and to highlight interpretations by contemporary scholars, both established Wright experts and others considering this iconic figure from new and illuminating perspectives.

Carole Ann Fabian is Director of Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library at Columbia University.

Barry Bergdoll is Curator of the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art and Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History and Archaeology in the Department of Art History, Columbia University.

Matthew Skjonsberg is a Ph.D. Researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, Switzerland.

Michael Osman is Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture and Design at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Neil Levine is Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of History of Art and Modern Architecture at Harvard University.

Jennifer Gray is Project Research Assistant in the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Therese O’Malley is Associate Dean in the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

Juliet Kinchin is Curator of the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Ken Tadashi Oshima is Professor in Department of Architecture at the University of Washington.

Elizabeth S. Hawley is a Ph.D. Candidate at The Graduate Center, City University of New York and Museum Research Consortium Fellow at The Museum of Modern Art.

Mabel O. Wilson is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University.

John Michael Desmond is Professor in the College of Art and Design at Louisiana State University.

Spyros Papapetros is Associate Professor of History and Theory of Architecture in the School of Architecture, Princeton University.

Janet Parks is Curator of Drawings & Archives, Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library at Columbia University.

Ellen Moody is Assistant Projects Conservator at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

David Smiley is Adjunct Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University.

This groundbreaking book explores postwar Latin American architecture during the dynamic years between 1955 and 1980--a period of extraordinary architectural creativity set against the backdrop of massive urbanization, nation-building, and political upheaval.

Key architects include Lina Bo Bardi, Luis Barragan, Félix Candela, Oscar Niemeyer, and Carlos Raul Villanueva, but the authors also significantly expand the cannon by including stellar--and often previously unpublished--work by lesser-known names such as Fernando Martínez Sanabria, Eladio Dieste and Jesús Tenreiro. The book is organized like an atlas, covering architecture in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

Across the region, unprecedented urbanization and modernization during these key years created an urgent need for new buildings, particularly for educational, residential and public spaces. University campuses proved especially conducive for architectural creativity, and the book provides documentation on the design of educational complexes, notably Carlos Raúl Villanueva’s Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas and UNAM in Mexico City.  Multiple experiments to improve housing include stunning projects such as PREVI (Projecto Experimental de Vivienda) housing experiment in Lima, Peru, and Lina Bo Bardi's work in São Paulo and Salvador. Other highlights include Clorindo Testa’s Banco de Londres in Buenos Aires, Rogelio Salmona's Torres del Parque in Bogotá, and, of course, the creation of the planned city of Brasília.

Throughout, the authors set the work in dialogue with Le Corbusier’s modernism and Brutalism, as well as with the political ideologies of the time, notably Developmentalism. Together, the material challenges the widely accepted notion of Latin America as a testing ground for innovations developed in Europe and the United States, and brings to light the high quality and radical originality of architecture and urban planning in this vast and complex region.

Published in conjunction with a major exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Latin America in Construction is edited by Barry Bergdoll, Curator, and Patricio del Real, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design, MoMA; Jorge Francisco Liernur, Universidad Torcuato di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Carlos Eduardo Comas, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil; and includes essays by over a dozen experts in the field. The 320-page book includes some 500 reproductions, providing a rich collection of visual resources on Latin American architecture, ranging from archival photographs, ephemera, drawings, models, and construction documents to striking contemporary color photographs of key buildings by the accomplished Brazilian architectural photographer Leonardo Finotti.

Readers of Latin America in Construction will be stunned by the sheer quantity of extraordinary buildings, the breathtaking speed of urban transformation and the enormous variety of architectural innovation.

Barry Bergdoll is the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and served as the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA from 2007 to 2013. He has been praised for "activist's sense of urgency and an academic's insistence on rigor." He is the author of European Architecture 1750–1890 (Oxford University Press, 200) in addition to the MoMA catalogues for Henri Labrouste, Home Delivery and Mies in Berlin. In his ongoing role as a part-time curator at MoMA, he is preparing an exhibition on Brazillian architect Lina BoBardi.

Carlos Eduardo Comas is Professor at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Jorge Francisco Liernur is Professor and former dean of the architecture school at The Universidad Torcuato di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Patricio del Real is a Curatorial Assistant at The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Nature has always been a source of inspiration for the design of the human environment, but in recent years this relationship has grown even more intense. “Nature as model” has influenced the most diverse possible concepts and developmental processes and is revealed in a large spectrum of forms and functions. Nature Design brings together projects and objects from design, architecture, landscape architecture, photography, and art that have been inspired by nature to develop complex and innovative works. The protagonists include Werner Aisslinger, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Herzog and de Meuron, Ross Lovegrove, Olaf Nicolai, Francois Roche, Lars Spuybroek, and Günther Vogt, among others. The book covers the historical and theoretical fundamentals of the themes sea, topography, plants, human beings, animals, scent, and climate. Nature Design is intended to reveal the diversity of possibilities for copying and reinventing nature and to open up new perspectives.