A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books

Vitruvius Without Text: The Biography of a Book by André Tavares gta Verlag , July 2022 Paperback | 4-1/2 x 6-3/4 inches | 250 pages | 61 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9783856764227 | $30 PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION : Vitruvius’s De Architectura , written in the first century BCE, has been revered as the first treatise on architectural theory. Since its resurrection during the Renaissance, the enigmatic text has been adjusted, refined, and redefined in subsequent iterations. This book bypasses exegeses of the text to focus on the material history of the printed editions disseminated throughout Europe. It surveys over a hundred editions of Vitruvius from 1486 to the present, tracing the power of the printed page in establishing the Roman author as an authority. Focusing on the impact of the physical objects that embody the Vitruvian canon, Vitruvius Without Text highlights how book history and architectural history cross paths while illuminating how a symbiotic relationship emerge...

Forms of Practice: German-Swiss Architecture, 1980-2000 Irina Davidovici gta Verlag , June 2019 (Second Edition) Paperback | 7 x 9-1/2 inches | 340 pages | 186 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-3856763787 | $75.00 Publisher Description : During the 1980s and 1990s, German-Swiss architecture gained worldwide acclaim on account of its structural and aesthetic coherence. Its precision, rigor and sobriety were, however, only outer manifestations of a deeper ethical orientation, reacting against formal arbitrariness and postmodern relativism. Swiss architects resorted to the discipline of concepts and formal reductionism in order to recover a sense of stability, normality, and cultural continuity. In Forms of Practice , Irina Davidovici provides an in-depth analysis of their work during the last decades of the twentieth century, discussing its cultural and theoretical conditions as facets of one artistic and cultural phenomenon. Richly detailed case studies and conceptual framew...

Giedion and America: Repositioning the History of Modern Architecture Reto Geiser gta Verlag , October 2018 Hardcover | 7 x 9-3/4 inches | 400 pages | 200 illustrations | English | ISBN: 978-3856763770 | $85.00 Publisher Description : Paradoxically, Swiss art historian and architecture critic Sigfried Giedion (1888–1968) would only consolidate his reputation as one of the most influential architectural historians of the twentieth century far from his homeland, in America. In his study of Giedion’s life and work Reto Geiser foregrounds the formative character of Giedion’s extended stays in the United States and their role as an inspiring laboratory to propel his scholarship. By challenging the presentation of a continuous line of developments, and revealing the ruptures and contradictions within Giedion’s work, Geiser questions a heroic account of modern architecture, turning instead to the less ideological and frequently overlooked facets of Giedion’s oeuvre. The boo...