March Kappe Reading List Selections Chronicle Experimental Territories and ‘Floppy Logic’
As a continuation of International Women’s History Month during March, this installment of the Kappe Library Reading list visits and revisits seminal works of architecture, art, and design—either made or chronicled by women. This selection of volumes covers topics that range from a historical investigation into how Las Vegas as an urban form revitalized the architecture discourse of the 70s and served as a key reference for postmodernism in architecture, urban design, and visual art, to a vivid, in-depth biographical profile of multifaceted and enigmatic Japanese American sculptor Ruth Asawa, to a chronological look at the role and implications that ruins play in contemporary architectural thought, methodology, and practice.
SCI-Arc regularly releases a reading list curated by the Kappe Library's Manager Kevin McMahon and Librarian Stefanie Crump representing a cohesive, interdisciplinary collection of books featuring pertinent themes and authors. The reading lists reflect the overall mission of the Kappe Library to build its collection with representation and inclusivity in mind, but also incongruity, specificity, and relevance to the discourses taking place at SCI-Arc.
Off the Walls: Inspired Re-creations of Iconic Artworks / with a preface by Sarah Waldorf and Annelisa Stephan, Getty Publications, 2020
Van Gogh’s Starry Night made out of spaghetti? Cat with a Pearl Earring? Frida Kahlo self-portraits with pets and toilet paper? While the world reeled from the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), thousands of people around the globe, inspired by challenges from Getty and other museums, raided toy chests, repurposed pantry items, and enlisted family, roommates, and animals to re-create famous works of art at home. Astonishing in their creativity, wit, and ingenuity, these creations remind us of the power of art to unite us and bring joy during troubled times. Off the Walls: Inspired Re-Creations of Iconic Artworks celebrates these imaginative re-creations, bringing highlights from this challenge together in one whimsical, irresistible volume. Getty Publications will donate all profits from the sale of this book to a charity supporting art and artists.
Art History: A Very Short Introduction / Dana Arnold, Oxford University Press, 2020
Art history encompasses the study of the history and development of painting, sculpture and the other visual arts. In this Very Short Introduction, Dana Arnold presents an introduction to the issues, debates, and artefacts that make up art history. Beginning with a consideration of what art history is, she explains what makes the subject distinctive from other fields of study, and also explores the emergence of social histories of art (such as Feminist Art History and Queer Art History). Using a wide range of images, she goes on to explore key aspects of the discipline including how we write, present, read, and look at art, and the impact this has on our understanding of art history. This second edition includes a new chapter on global art histories, considering how the traditional emphasis on periods and styles in art originated in western art and can obscure other critical approaches and artwork from non-western cultures. Arnold also discusses the relationship between art and history, and the ways in which art can tell a different history from the one narrated by texts.
Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa / Marilyn Chase, Chronicle Books, 2020
This is the story of a woman who wielded imagination and hope in the face of intolerance and who transformed everything she touched into art. In this compelling biography, author Marilyn Chase brings Asawa's story to vivid life. She draws on Asawa's extensive archives and weaves together many voices—family, friends, teachers, and critics—to offer a complex and fascinating portrait of the artist.
Born in California in 1926, Ruth Asawa grew from a farmer's daughter to a celebrated sculptor. She survived adolescence in the World War II Japanese-American internment camps and attended the groundbreaking art school at Black Mountain College. Asawa then went on to develop her signature hanging-wire sculptures, create iconic urban installations, revolutionize arts education in her adopted hometown of San Francisco, fight through lupus, and defy convention to nurture a multiracial family.
Space and Anti-Space: The Fabric of Place, City and Architecture / Steven Peterson and Barbara Littenberg, ORO Editions, 2020
Space and Anti-Space: The Fabric of Place, City and Architecture challenges the conventional idea of what constitutes the physical form of the contemporary city. Observing the absence of extended urban fabrics—the missing urbanism—in the new global cities developed today, it argues that these cities are merely statistical accumulations of density that lack the positive attributes of a genuine urban condition. Cities as urban places cannot be made by individual buildings alone but rather depend on the intertwined combination of an architecture that is bound to the creation of public spaces and streets, and engaged in the structure of urban blocks to form a complex field pattern of interactive solids and voids.
In a series of essays, articles, and urban projects extensively illustrated by plans, analytic diagrams, and dramatic images, this book makes a visual and verbal argument for the steps that need to be taken to re-urbanize the city in order to achieve an urbanity consisting of multiple discrete places that depend on the essential concept of contained geometrical space. These spatial ideas are illustrated in this book in three proposals: for Rome, in “Roma Interrotta,” 1979; Paris, the “Consultation Internationale pour L’Aménagement du Quartier des Halles,” 1980; and New York in the “World Trade Center Site Innovative Design Study,” 2002.
Elizabeth Scheu Close: A Life in Modern Architecture / Jane King Hession, University of Minnesota Press, 2020
One of few women who were practicing architects in the mid-twentieth century, Elizabeth “Lisl” Scheu Close left an indelible mark on Minnesota’s built landscape. This personal and professional biography also explores multiple aspects of modern architecture, including the use of new materials and technologies, the design of prefabricated houses, and the relationship between residential design and changing American lifestyles.
Eyes That Saw: Architecture After Las Vegas
/ edited by Stanislaus von Moos and Martino Stierli, Yale School of Architecture, 2020
Published in 1972, Learning from Las Vegas was an almost instant—yet controversial—classic. Born of a design and research studio led by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and graduate student Steven Izenour at the Yale School of Architecture in 1968, its exploration of the signs and urban form of Las Vegas revitalized the architecture discourse of the 1970s and a key reference for postmodernism in architecture, urban design, visual art, and history more broadly. It remains influential for architects, urbanists, and design theorists to the present day.
Five decades after the legendary Las Vegas studio, Eyes that Saw: Architecture after Las Vegas, published in collaboration with Yale School of Architecture, offers a richly illustrated collection of essays investigating the significance of the fieldwork that constituted the basis of Learning from Las Vegas from various perspectives. The essays also discuss the great architectural tome’s unique position in a network of social, political, and intellectual forces. Published alongside are documents from the Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates archive, as well as an illustrated chronology of international media following the publication of Learning from Las Vegas. Contributors include architects, artists, and scholars, such as Stan Allen, Eve Blau, Beatriz Colomina, Valéry Didelon, Elizabeth Diller, Peter Fischli, Dan Graham, Neil Levine, Mary McLeod, Rafael Moneo, Stanislaus von Moos, Katherine Smith, Martino Stierli, Karin Theunissen, Robert Venturi, and Denise Scott Brown.
Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929-1975 / Susan S. Benjamin and Michelangelo Sabatino, Monacelli Press, 2020
Famed as the birthplace of that icon of twentieth-century architecture, the skyscraper, Chicago also cultivated a more humble but no less consequential form of modernism–the private residence. Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929-75 explores the substantial yet overlooked role that Chicago and its suburbs played in the development of the modern single-family house in the twentieth century. In a city often associated with the outsize reputations of Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the examples discussed in this generously illustrated book expand and enrich the story of the region’s built environment.
Authors Susan Benjamin and Michelangelo Sabatino survey dozens of influential houses by architects whose contributions are ripe for reappraisal, such as Paul Schweikher, Harry Weese, Keck & Keck, and William Pereira. From the bold, early example of the “Battledeck House” by Henry Dubin (1930) to John Vinci and Lawrence Kenny’s gem the Freeark House (1975), the generation-spanning residences discussed here reveal how these architects contended with climate and natural setting while negotiating the dominant influences of Wright and Mies. They also reveal how residential clients–typically middle-class professionals, progressive in their thinking–helped to trailblaze modern architecture in America. Though reflecting different approaches to site, space, structure, and materials, the examples in Modern in the Middle reveal an abundance of astonishing houses that have never been collected into one study–until now.
The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture / Susan Stewart, University of Chicago Press, 2020
How have ruins become so valued in Western culture and so central to our art and literature? Covering a vast chronological and geographical range, from ancient Egyptian inscriptions to twentieth-century memorials, Susan Stewart seeks to answer this question as she traces the appeal of ruins and ruins images, and the lessons that writers and artists have drawn from their haunting forms.
Stewart takes us on a sweeping journey through founding legends of broken covenants and original sin, the Christian appropriation of the classical past, and images of decay in early modern allegory. Stewart looks in depth at the works of Goethe, Piranesi, Blake, and Wordsworth, each of whom found in ruins a means of reinventing his art. Lively and engaging, The Ruins Lesson ultimately asks what can resist ruination—and finds in the self-transforming, ever-fleeting practices of language and thought a clue to what might truly endure.
Floppy Logic: Experimenting in the Territory Between Architecture, Fashion and Textiles / Leanne Zilka, Actar, 2020
Floppy Logic is an exploration into the 'architecture' of fashion and textiles, and how the concepts, aesthetics, techniques, and construction of this architecture might be understood and used to design and fabricate objects and space differently. A key concept here is the Floppy, defined as a quality in material that requires extraneous support to produce architecture. Floppy generally refers to fabric but can also refer to any material that fails when there is not enough support, as is the case with sheet materials when the span between supports exceeds a certain length. Floppy Logic uses a material palette that has been selected for its aesthetic and tactile nature. These materials are typically used superficially and do not have structural qualities to allow them to be applied to the scale of buildings. By exploring form through material play, as fashion designers do with draping fabric over a body, this book expands on approaches to architecture that consider form, structure, skin, and enclosure as separate steps.
Habitat: Lina Bo Bardi
/ edited by Adriano Pedrosa, et al, DelMonico Books; Prestel Verlag, 2020
Lina Bo Bardi is regarded as one of the most important architects in Brazil’s history. Beginning her career as a Modernist architect in Rome, Bo Bardi and her husband emigrated to Brazil following the end of WWII. Bo Bardi quickly resumed her practice in her adopted homeland with architecture that was both modern and firmly rooted in the culture of Brazil. In 1951 she designed “Casa de Vidro” (“Glass House”), her first built work, where she and her husband would live for the rest of their lives. She also designed the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (São Paulo Art Museum/MASP), a landmark of Latin American modernist architecture which opened in 1968. It was for this museum she created the iconic glass easel display system, which remains radical to date. This book presents a comprehensive record of Bo Bardi’s overarching approach to art and architecture and shows how her exhibition designs, curatorial projects, and writing informed her spatial designs. Essays on Bo Bardi’s life and work accompany archival material such as design sketches and writings by the artist, giving new insight into the conceptual and material processes behind this radical thinker and creator’s projects.