The following books are linked to entries (structures) in the database.
The page references on the web pages are to the first page of the commentary in the text of the source (unless the source only contains a photograph and a caption). Photographic plates of the entry may be elsewhere in the source.
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Peter Reyner Banham Hon. FRIBA (2 March 1922 – 19 March 1988) was an English architectural critic and writer best known for his theoretical treatise Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) and for his 1971 book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. In the latter he categorized the Los Angeles experience into four ecological models (Surfurbia, Foothills, The Plains of Id, and Autopia) and explored the distinct architectural cultures of each. A frequent visitor to the United States from the early 1960s, he relocated there in 1976.
Banham taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (1964-76) and the State University of New York (SUNY) Buffalo (1976 to 1980), and through the 1980s at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He had been appointed the Sheldon H. Solow Professor of the History of Architecture at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University shortly before his death, but he never taught there. In 2014 The Bartlett established a named Chair appointment of the Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural History and Theory. [Wikipedia]
Banham, Reyner, Guide to Modern Architecture. London: The Architectural Press, 1962.
also
Banham, Reyner, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. London: The Architectural Press, 1960.
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Sigfried Giedion was the son of a textile manufacturer from Lake Zug, Switzerland. He graduated from the University of Vienna in 1913 with a degree in engineering. Not wanting to enter the family business, he wrote poems and plays, one of which was staged by Max Reinhardt. He then studied art history in Munich with Heinrich Wölfflin, graduating in 1922 with a thesis on Romanesque and late Baroque Classicism. This work aroused the interest of A.E. Brinckmann, a well-known art historian, who invited him to Cologne, an offer that Giedion refused because he was not interested in an academic career. Instead, in 1923 he attended the Bauhaus, where he met Walter Gropius. From that meeting he got closer and closer to the Bauhaus and its protagonists, becoming himself a precursor of the modern movement.
In 1928 he founded, together with Le Corbusier and Helène de Mandrot, the CIAM, of which he was also general secretary. In the same year he took part in the collective initiative Werkbundsiedlung Neubühl, one of the first residential centers in the style of the modern movement, remaining on the steering committee until 1939. He was also the builder of the Doldertalhäuser in Switzerland, which he saw as a manifesto of the new architectural movement, as well as founder of Wohnbedarf AG, a construction company close to the modern movement . Through countless interventions in international trade journals, he expressed his support for Le Corbusier’s League of Nations project in Geneva, won in 1927 but disqualified because the submission was in the wrong medium.
In 1938–39 he taught at Harvard University at the instigation of Gropius, where he gave the Charles Eliot Norton Memorial Lectures. These helped form the basis for his work, Space, Time and Architecture, the history of the modern movement published in 1941. In 1946 he became a professor at the ETH-Zürich (Federal Polytechnic School), a post he held until the 1960s, and which he alternated with another at MIT in the United States of America. During this time he wrote busily, both as a CIAM editor and as an independent author, about his research on modernity, most notably Mechanization Takes Command, a critical history of mechanization seen in its historical and sociological aspects. [Wikipedia]
Giedion, Sigfried, Space, Time and Architecture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
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Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, Philip Johnson, The International Style. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1966 [1932].
“The photographs and the plans were for the most part provided by the architects themselves.” Exceptions are noted.
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Kidder Smith, G.E., the new architecture of europe [sic]. Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1961.
photographs are by the author unless noted otherwise
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Pevsner, Nikolaus, Pioneers of Modern Design. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1960.
also
Pevsner, Nikolaus, An Outline of European Architecture. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1943. [most references simply mention the building in context – see the book]
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Richards, J.M., An Introduction to Modern Architecture. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1962.