Krefeld Villas, Aegean Art, Madrid & Mies van der Rohe

Krefeld Villas

With all of the attention Mies van der Rohe has received over the last few years, it's hard to believe that there could be a pair of "undiscovered" buildings begging for even the slightest consideration - and receiving none. Such has been the fate, however, of Mies van der Rohe's Krefeld Villas, a pair of neighboring brick residences of typically restrained elegance built from 1927 to 1930. Their anonymity is, to some degree, Mies van der Rohe's own doing; in 1959, in his only public comment about the projects, he quipped that he would have preferred to use more glass, but the clients objected. "I had great trouble," he said.
As historians Kent Kleinman and Leslie van Duzer show in this carefully researched, eminently readable study, sometimes it's best not to take the architect at his word. Here they guide us through the two villas, which were converted into a joined museum of contemporary art after World War II. Each chapter begins with a study of an artist who has created a site-specific installation within the villas. By analyzing how Yves Klein, Sol LeWitt, Richard Serra, and Ernst Caramelle chose to engage Mies van der Rohe's architecture, they arrive at a truly original understanding of these two forgotten masterworks.
Professors of architecture Kent Kleinman and Leslie Van Duzer are co-authors of Villa Müller: A Work of Adolf Loos (Princeton Architectural Press) and Rudolf Arnheim: Revealing Vision. Van Duzer has taught at Arizona State University since 2000. Kent Kleinman has held professorships at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, the Hochschule der Kunst in Berlin, the Royal Academy in Copenhagen, and the ETH in Zürich.
Krefeld Villas by Kent Kleinman
ISBN: 1568985037

Aegean Art and Architecture

The discoveries in Crete, Greece, and the Aegean islands that began a century ago were nothing less than stunning, and seemed to give shape and substance to tales of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth, of Theseus and Ariadne, of Minos and Icarus. Ancient Aegean Art is the first comprehensive historical introduction to the art and architecture Crete, mainland Greece, and the Cycladic islands in the Aegean, beginning with the Neolithic period, before 3000 BCE, and ending at the close of the Bronze Age and the transition to the Iron Age of Hellenic Greece (c.1000 BCE).
Covering a broad range of objects and artifacts, from sealstones to pots to buildings and settlements, Preziosi and Hitchcock discuss both the historiography of the field of ancient art history and explain the artifacts original intentions and functions. In chronologically organized chapters, the authors emphasize the more widely known images and structures, with a glimpse at the lesser-known but important discoveries, explaining their design, uses, meanings, and formal developments. Ancient Aegean Art incorporates the latest archeological discoveries and theoretical and methodological developments, in the only volume to examine both Crete and the mainland. Aegean Art and Architecture by Donald Preziosi and Louise A. Hitchcock
Oxford, 2000

Madrid: Plaza Mayor and the Shaping of Baroque Madrid

The Plaza Mayor and the Shaping of Baroque Madrid examines the transformation of Madrid from a secondary market town to the capital of the worldwide Spanish Habsburg empire.
Focusing on the planning and building of Madrid's principal public monument, the Plaza Mayor, it is based on an analysis of archival documents, architectural drawings, and the surviving built fabric of the city itself.
Jesus Escobar demonstrates how the shaping of the city square and its environs reflects the bureaucratic nature of government in Madrid, chosen in 1561 to serve as a capital of Spain. He also examines the careful planning of the city, with particular regard to the necessities of housing and public works that accompanied its new status as capital. The process reveals the sophistication of town planning in late-sixteenth-century Spain and forces a reconsideration of Spanish urbanism within the contexts of contemporary European and Spanish colonial developments.
The Plaza Mayor and the Shaping of Baroque Madrid by Jesus Escobar
ISBN: 052181507X

Mies van der Rohe by Jean-Louis Cohen

This book examines the life and work of one of the great architects of our time, Mies van der Rohe. Beginning and ending in Berlin, from the pre-1914 houses for the intelligentsia to the final masterpiece of 1968, the Neue Nationalgalerie, this essay records the stages of a distinguished career from the Bauhaus to Chicago, Detroit, Montreal and to New York, with the famous Seagram Building, confirming Mies van der Rohe as the equal of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier.
Jean-Louis Cohen brings out the paradoxes in this elegant, remote, refined and mysterious personality: the man who built the monument to Rosa Luxembourg and who flirted with the Nazi regime; the architect who affirmed, in one of his famous aphorisms, that less is more and yet does not hesitate to use the most sophisticated materials for his buildings.
This study shows how Mies van der Rohe designed, in his initial types, and in their development, categories of buildings as symbolic of the capitalist way of production as of the Florentine palaces of Quattrocento society'.
Mies van der Rohe by Jean-Louis Cohen
ISBN: 0419203303

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