Albert Speer, Clerisseau, Central Park & Chipperfield

Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth

Gitta Sereny first saw Albert Speer on trial at Nuremberg. Over the last years of his life she came to know him - through hundreds of hours of conversations - as no other biographer has known a Nazi leader. Sereny interviewed as well the people around him - the celebrated, the notorious and the ordinary. Albert Speer gave Gitta Sereny, for her use, a number of unpublished manuscripts, and after his death she obtained access to many of his papers. Out of her probings a huge, and hugely alive, portrait emerges.
Gitta Sereny takes us through the emotional desert of Speer's childhood and marriage, through his embrace (basically, she demonstrates, for nonideological reasons) of the Nazi Party and his service as Minister of Armaments and Munitions, during which his brutal use of slave labor extended a lost war. She superbly portrays the circles in which Albert Speer functioned: the ambivalent General Staff and the infinitely peculiar and nightmarish upper echelons of Nazism. We see Speer accused of war crimes at Nuremberg, and during his twenty years in Spandau prison, struggling to accept individual responsibility for his actions. Throughout, in person or in memory, Adolf Hitler is startlingly present, his friendship with Albert Speer bordering on love. Gitta Sereny shows us Albert Speer as inveterate schemer, as spectacular planner and maneuverer. We see Albert Speer also as unique among Adolf Hitler's men in the integrity of his battle with conscience. His progress from moral blindness through moral self-education to a torturous coming-to-terms with his own acts - this is the elemental matter at the heart of a book that stunningly illuminates the man, the war, the Third Reich, the Nazi mind and the complex comingling, in one person or society, of good and evil.
Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth by Gitta Sereny
Knopf Publishing, 1996

Charles-Louis Clerisseau

Charles-Louis Clerisseau (1721-1820), the French architect, archaeologist, and artist, occupies a unique position in the genesis and wide-ranging adoption of neoclassical architecture during the second half of the eighteenth century. His skillful drawings in particular of ancient decorative details, of real and imaginary ruins, and of ancient-style buildings - helped create a style that was to influence such notable figures as Catherine the Great and Thomas Jefferson. Clerisseau's vision of antiquity as the basis for a new architecture is eloquently expressed in the 169 drawings reproduced here.
Thomas McCormick's book is the first comprehensive and balanced study of Clerisseau. It carefully charts his role in the creation of neoclassicism in Italy and its diffusion to France, Germany, England, Russia, and the United States. McCormick describes the influence on his work and development of Clerisseau's relationships to the architects Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Johann Joachim Winckelmann and to his students William Chambers and Robert Adam, among others. It was during his stay in Italy with Adam that Clerisseau made many of the unusually beautiful and sensitive drawings of antique forms that are among the more than 100 now in the Hermitage Museum, Leningrad. McCormick also clarifies Clerisseau's muchdebated role in the design of the state capitol in Richmond, Virginia.
Thomas McCormick is Professor of Art at Wheaton College. An Architectural History Foundation Book.
Charles-Louis Clerisseau and the Genesis of Neoclassicism by Thomas McCormick MIT Press, 1990

Icons of Architecture

This illustrated volume is the best of what international architectural experts have to offer: a convincing selection of the century's superlative architecture from the turn of the century to present day. The buildings examined in this book, well-known today as icons of 2Oth century architecture, were considered spectacular in their own times for reasons ranging from stylistic innovation to technological breakthrough. New York City's Chrysler Building, Lloyd's of London, and the exciting new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain - each of these structures, whether treasured or despised, has become a modern-day place of pilgrimage, and the stories behind their rise to iconic status have shed light on how we think about the built environment. Each building is presented in a double-page spread with brilliant photographs, original drawings, and helpful plans. Texts written by recognized specialists describe each work's design features and historical significance.
Icons of Architecture: The 20th Century by Sabine Thiel-Siling
Prestel, 1998

Central Park

Central Park, America's first public park, is a paragon of nineteenth-century landscape design and one of the world's great urban spaces. Marking the park's 150th anniversary, Central Park, An American Masterpiece is a definitive illustrated history that celebrates the splendor and significance of this national treasure. The park has just undergone a nearly three-hundred-million-dollar restoration that took more than two decades, and it has never looked more beautiful. Author Sara Cedar Miller, the official historian and photographer for the Central Park Conservancy, draws on extensive research to tell the captivating story of the park's creation and provides surprising and fresh insights into its design. Fascinating period views and original plans and drawings - many previously unpublished, including two competition entries thought to be lost - are complemented by Miller's breathtaking photographs, which reveal the rejuvenated park in all its glory. Placing Central Park in the context of nineteenth-century American art and social history, Miller's lively text illuminates the roles of its stellar designers Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, explores how the original plan was modified in the course of construction, and traces the evolution of the park over the decades. She also gives long overdue credit to the designers' associate Jacob Wrey Mould, whose extraordinary sculptural program for Bethesda Terrace is an artistic achievement of the highest order.
Readers are led from the gates at Grand Army Plaza, along the Mall and its formal allee of elms, to the heart of the park, Bethesda Terrace and Fountain, whose iconography is explored in detail. The tour continues through each of the park's distinctive landscapes - among them the pastoral Sheep Meadow, North Meadow, and Harlem Meer; the picturesque Ramble and Ravine - which are prime exemplars of aesthetic trends in nineteenth-century landscape design. These landscapes appear to be totally natural but were, in fact, entirely man-made through the arduous process of blasting stone outcrops, carting in millions of cubic yards of soil, and planting vast areas of trees, shrubs, and flowers for special effects of texture and color. Readers also visit the park's architectural highlights such as Belvedere Castle and the Dairy, stopping along the way to admire its fanciful bridges - no two alike - its outstanding assortment of rustic shelters and furniture, its enchanting gardens such as Conservatory Garden and Shakespeare Garden, and its superb and varied public sculptures. Offering the rich experience of an in-depth tour of the park, this book will delight New Yorkers and visitors alike.
Central Park, an American Masterpiece: A Comprehensive History of the Nation's First Urban Park by Sara Cedar Miller
ISBN: 0810939460

David Chipperfield: Architectural Works 1990-2002

Of the new generation of architects practicing today in Britain under the rubric "neo-minimalists," none has a higher critical reputation than David Chipperfield. As his fame and commissions have grown worldwide, Chipperfield now find himself in the circle of elite architects, including Tadao Ando and Peter Zumthor, whose reputations have been built on an architecture of spare sensuousness.
Chipperfield's London-based practice has recently garnered a large number of prestigious projects, among them the reconstruction of the Neues Museum and master plan of the Museum Island in Berlin. His River and Rowing museum on the Thames has been hailed as "a minor masterpiece, a match of modern manners and time-honored materials" and won the Building of the Year Award from the Royal Fine Art Commission. The projects covered in this large-format, beautifully produced book include: airframe furniture; BFI Film Centre, London; the Figge Arts Center in Davenport, Illinois; the Royal Collections Museum in Madrid; the Toyota Auto building in Kyoto; and the San Michele Cemetery in Venice, among many others. Stunning photographs, and Chipperfield's preparatory sketches and countless drawings illustrate this exquisite work.
David Chipperfield: Architectural Works 1990-2002 by David Chipperfield, Thomas Weaver (Editor), Foreword by Kenneth Frampton
Princeton Architectural Press, 2003
ISBN: 1568984073

Embassy Residences in Washington

Diplomacy demands a certain style: no capital can compete with Washington, D.C. for the sheer presence, the elegance, and diversity of its diplomatic headquarters. All along the boulevards representatives of world governments live and work in residences that are technically the territory of each nation. Recently, countries like Italy have chosen to build embassies and residences that project their political purpose to the passerby.
Walk through the gates of the mansions on Massachusetts Avenue and enter an array of interiors, gardens, and offices that are designs for international living. The splendid images in this book, captured by Antonio Castañeda-Buraglia, take the reader into the rooms in the heart of buildings where diplomatic history lives. The forty-five homes here are the U.S. addresses for the best art, handicrafts, garden styles, interior decoration, and often, personal history, of diplomats who represent the world to America. These details taken together present a world of international design choices-each room with a very worldy purpose.
Embassy Residences in Washington D.C. by Jane C. Loeffler, Walter L. Cutler and Lily Uridinola de Bianqui
Villegas Editores, 2003
ISBN: 9588156130

More information

Architecture Main Page