Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Softcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> Taking another look at the architecture of the 20th century we find a suprising number of exhibition pavilions among its most important works. The unusual fact that such small and ephemeral buildings have managed to form part of the iconography of modern architecture is due to the mystery that has forever surrounded them and which resides in their special procedural conditions: a somewhat hasty gestation a brief existence in time and a sudden end. Only a few reminders of their existence remain: local press reports the recall of some visitor or other a few plans we cannot check against the original model and a limited number of photos preserved in far-flung archives. What we are able to reconstruct through the evidence of these documents and photographs makes for certain discontinuities in the history of 20th-century architecture a history which is fissured by the disappearance of a number of buildings sufficiently important for us to feel them as genuine losses as incisions that inevitably cut across it. The documents that we rely on for their reconstruction maintain them in their primary state with few alterations: they have died young. Their ephemeral existence does not permit the years to pass and time leaves no mark on them. By preserving their original unaltered state in the few varia tions we are able to discern in the documents they have left behind of their brief existence we posit their history without any defects. without any deterioration. Registered in a snapshot which saves them from disappearing altogether pavilions become a cult object for modern archaeology. They require a different approach to become known; we cannot visit them. Their physical non-existence their loss. calls for a continuous re-updating a mise-en-sc?ne every time we wish to reconstruct them. (SP)