Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent unused condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> In the exclusionary world of high modern architecture it is disconcerting to discover that two icons of the movement both admired the work of Sir Edwin Lutyens – an architect who had little or no interest in modernism. Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright created buildings that are very different and the two men did not even like each other but they shared a common fascination for the distinctively non-international style architecture of Sir Edwin Lutyens. This polemical text is an account of why this occurred. By exposing common aesthetic and structural themes in the architecture of these three giants including the cities of New Delhi and Chandigarh in India the author explains why Wright and Corbu may have shared more common ground with Lutyens than with much of the world of contemporary modernism. It is easy to conclude that currently acceptable accounts of the architecture of the twentieth century may be inadequate. In fact they may actually blind us to more powerful undercurrents that will completely revise our understanding of this the architecture of the period. By adopting a more inclusive view that includes Lutyens with Wright and Le Corbusier and the host of architects like de Klerk Dudok Asplund together with the early neglected buildings of Aalto Corbu and Mies we may find that all these architects share common ground with each other and with great classicists like Charles Holden and Raymond Erith in England and their peers in America. This text was written in 1967 in a student journal in the United States with very limited circulation. It has remained an underground classic. Perhaps this is because its contents are so disruptive of our current views of twentieth century modernism that the architectural academy would prefer it remain underground. It was the basis of the first exhibition of Lutyens’s work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1979. (LL)