“Avant-Garde in the Cornfields is an in-depth study of New Harmony, Indiana, a unique town in the American Midwest renowned as the site of two successive Utopian settlements during the nineteenth century: the Harmonists and the Owenites. This engrossing and well-documented book explores the architecture, topography, and preservation of New Harmony during both periods and addresses troubling questions about the origin, production, and meaning of the town’s modern structures. An important reappraisal of postwar American architecture from a rural perspective, it provides provocative ideas about how history is interpreted through design and historic preservation – and about how the extraordinary…

“X-Ray Architecture explores the enormous impact of medical discourse and imaging technologies on the formation, representation and reception of twentieth-century architecture. It challenges the normal understanding of modern architecture by proposing that it was shaped by the dominant medical obsession of its time: tuberculosis and its primary diagnostic tool, the X-ray. Modern architecture and the X-ray were born around the same time and evolved in parallel. While the X-ray exposed the inside of the body to the public eye, the modern building unveiled its interior, dramatically inverting the relationship between private and public. Architects presented their buildings as a kind…

I discovered by working with actual glass models that the important thing is the play of reflections and not the effect of light and shadow as in ordinary buildings   Ludwig Mies van der Rohe[1] Should We Save Mid-Century Modern Icons That Hurt The Environment? James Timberlake,  2015[2] Reglazing Modernism Between the above quoted poetic remark by star architect Mies and sceptic recent observations of  architect James Timberlake, manoeuvre the authors. The publication, by Birkhäuser Architecture in a German and an English edition, introduces itself as the first one of a serial. The list of examples (nine in USA and eleven…

“Since early times, humans have explored the space below their feet for different purposes: to flee persecution and war, to find protection from severe climates, to improve urban life—and more recently, to solve environmental problems. A rare look at old and new subterranean structures, this book examines the underworld through the lenses of wartime, life and death, religious and secular rituals, and adaptive reuse. The projects described range widely in time period and type, from a house in a defunct nuclear silo to an Arctic seed bank, a Beirut nightclub, art venues, an Italian winery, and a monastery carved into…

Stéphane Laurent – the Head of Art & Industry studies (Decorative Arts, Fashion and Design) of the University Pantheon-Sorbonne, School of Art History and Archeology – has directed the publication Une émergence du design. France, 20e siècle [An emergence of design. France, 20th century] (2019) which is now available online. The publication assembles a collection of essays, in French and English, from various professionals, ranging from decorative arts to graphic design and politics. Sommaire Avant-propos Design et politique Stéphane Laurent Décoration, design et politique : l’École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs de 1940 à 1968 Des arts décoratifs au design…