Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812–1852) was one of the most influential architects and designers of the nineteenth century, a man whose ideas and design principles were adopted and developed by followers as diverse as William Morris and Frank Lloyd Wright. As an architect, Pugin created cathedrals, churches, colleges, convents, and a wide range of domestic buildings whose form and structure changed the nature of architecture in his era. As a designer, he was responsible for the Gothic Revival, the most popular decorative form in Britain and around the world, and he was the creator of stunning furniture and woodwork; silver, metalwork, and jewelry; pottery and tiles; textiles and wallpapers; and books. This important book, written by eminent scholars, presents a comprehensive picture of Pugin, his achievements, and his times.

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Perhaps no other great modern architect has been linked to a native country as closely as Alvar Aalto (1898–1976). Critics have argued that the essence of Finland flows, as if naturally, into his quasi-organic forms, ranging from such buildings as the Baker House in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to iconic 20th-century designs, including his Savoy vase and bent-plywood stacking stools.

What did Aalto himself say about the importance of nationalism and geography in his work and in architecture generally? With an unprecedented focus on the architect’s own writings, library, and critical reception, Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen proposes a dramatically different interpretation of Aalto’s oeuvre, revealing it as a deeply thoughtful response to his intellectual and cultural milieu—especially to Finland’s dynamic political circumstances following independence from Russia in 1917.

Pelkonen also considers the geographic and geopolitical narratives found in his writings. These include ideas about national style and national cultural revival, and about how architecture can foster cosmopolitanism, internationalism, and regionalism. Expanding the canonical reading of Aalto, this work promises to influence future inquiries on Aalto for generations to come.

"This novel interpretation sheds a clear light on Aalto's relationship with Finland's society and culture, not merely by better defining the architect's often overlooked 'context,' but by recreating the intellectual milieus in which he developed. Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen introduces a very fresh discussion of Aalto's writings and designs in the framework of Finland's modern history."—Jean-Louis Cohen, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

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The sleek lines and gleaming facades of the architecture of the late 1940s and 1950s reflect a culture fascinated by the promise of the Jet Age. Buildings like Eero Saarinen's TWA Terminal at JFK Airport and Philip Johnson's Four Seasons Restaurant retain a thrilling allure, seeming to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. In this work, distinguished architectural historian Alice Friedman draws on a vast range of sources to argue that the aesthetics of mid-century modern architecture reflect an increasing fascination with "glamour," a term widely used in those years to characterize objects, people, and experiences as luxurious, expressive, and even magical.

Featuring assessments of architectural examples ranging from Mies van der Rohe's monolithic Seagram Building to Elvis Presley's sprawling Graceland estate, as well as vintage photographs, advertisements, and posters, this book argues that new audiences and client groups with tastes rooted in popular entertainment made their presence felt in the cultural marketplace during the postwar period. The author suggests that American and European architecture and design increasingly reflected the values of a burgeoning consumer society, including a fundamental confidence in the power of material objects to transform the identity and status of those who owned them.

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This remarkable book is one of a two-volume set that examines the impact of Rome on American artists and writers from the earliest days of the new republic. William L. Vance presents examples of American painting, sculpture, and writings of many different kinds (novels, poetry, travel books, letters, cultural commentary, journalism) that have been inspired by American encounters with Roman places and people over two centuries.

Volume I focuses on the influence of classical Rome, showing how the Forum and the Colosseum inspired American thoughts of ideal republics and powerful empires, how the Campagna was an ambiguous image of Arcadia or wasteland in the aftermath of empire, and how the Pantheon and the galleries of antique sculpture presented a pagan challenge to American ideas of divinity, beauty, and sexuality.

America's Rome: Volume II—Catholic and Contemporary Rome is also available on the A&AePortal.

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In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, burgeoning American cities like New Orleans and Philadelphia seemed increasingly chaotic. Noise, odors, and a feverish level of activity on the streets threatened to overwhelm the senses. Growing populations placed new demands on every aspect of the urban landscape—streets, parks, schools, asylums, cemeteries, markets, waterfronts, and more. In this unique exploration of the early history of urban architecture and design, leading architectural historian Dell Upton reveals the fascinating confluence of sociological, cultural, and psychological factors that shaped American cities in the antebellum years.

Through contemporary travel accounts, diaries, and correspondence, as well as maps, architectural drawings, paintings, and prints—many previously unpublished—Upton investigates not only how buildings were designed, streets were laid out, and urban space was put to use, but also why. He offers original insights into the way cities were imagined, and an extensive selection of illustrations recreates the various features of the urban landscape in the nineteenth century.

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*Many of the black-and-white images in the original print edition have been replaced by color images in this ePortal version."

Through Creole houses and merchant stores to sugar fields and boiling houses, Jamaica played a leading role in the formation of both the early modern Atlantic world and the British Empire. Architecture and Empire in Jamaica offers the first scholarly analysis of Jamaican architecture in the long 18th century, spanning roughly from the Port Royal earthquake of 1692 to Emancipation in 1838. In this richly illustrated study, which includes hundreds of the author’s own photographs and drawings, Louis P. Nelson examines surviving buildings and archival records to write a social history of architecture.

Nelson begins with an overview of the architecture of the West African slave trade then moves to chapters framed around types of buildings and landscapes, including the Jamaican plantation landscape and fortified houses to the architecture of free blacks. He concludes with a consideration of Jamaican architecture in Britain. By connecting the architecture of the Caribbean first to West Africa and then to Britain, Nelson traces the flow of capital and makes explicit the material, economic, and political networks around the Atlantic. 

First published in 1965 and now available in a revised edition, The Architecture of the Roman Empire has been hailed as a comprehensive and penetrating account of the rise of Roman Imperial architecture, an architecture whose great vaulted spaces and monumental exteriors defined such terms as “palace” and “Pantheon” for all time.

William L. MacDonald documents the genesis of this new architecture by describing, analyzing, and evaluating four key monuments erected in Rome between A.D. 60 and 130: the palaces of Nero and Domitian, the first true palaces of Europe; Trajan’s Markets (besides his Forum), a superb example of Rome’s highly original social architecture; and the mighty Pantheon. Planned and constructed for the paramount city of the Empire, these building radically altered the history of design and construction. The essentially urban architecture they defined soon appeared in hundreds of prosperous cities and towns, evoking an imagery of Rome throughout its dominions and later carrying many Roman concepts of design into Mediterranean and European architecture.

The emphasis throughout is upon the direct testimony of the buildings as they stand today, and the text is augmented by many plans, reconstructions, and photographs. For the revised edition MacDonald has updated the bibliography and added a new chapter in which he reviews recent studies and continues to probe questions of style and significance that he raised earlier. This book stands as one of lasting value to architectural historians, archaeologists, and the classicists as well as to students of ancient history and culture.

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The author of a classic work on the architecture of imperial Rome here broadens his focus to present an original study of urban architecture in Roman market towns, port cities, veterans’ colonies, and major metropolitan centers throughout the empire.

“Simply the best book on Roman urbanism [that] I know. . . . A formidable breakthrough. It brings to life the genius of Roman urbanism and reveals its continuing relevance for present urban planning and architecture.”—Leon Krier, Architects Journal

“In this very fine book—the successor to his Introductory Study—William L. MacDonald lays before the reader the physical evidence of what a Roman city was like for its inhabitants. . . . The illustrations in An Urban Appraisal, this second volume of The Architecture of the Roman Empire, are superbly chosen, illuminating the text as well as being interesting in themselves. . . . It is a joy to find a book so attractively designed, worthy of both its author and his subject.”—Martin Henig, The Times Literary Supplement

Winner of the 1986 Alice Davis Hitchcock Award of the Society of Architectural Historians for the most distinguished work of scholarship in architectural history.

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Yale University Press/Pelican History of Art

This important book examines the development of the principal styles of ancient American architecture, sculpture, and painting until the end of the Aztec and Inca empires in the sixteenth century. Written by esteemed scholar George Kubler, the volume aims to explain works of art as such, rather than dwelling upon those ideas about civilization that art is often made to illustrate in books of a more archaeological character. The Art and Architecture of Ancient America is arranged by geographical regions in three main divisions: Mexico, Central America and western South America. Architecture, sculpture, and painting occupy most of the volume, but town planning, pottery, textiles, and jewelry are also discussed. Many of the illustrations portray little known sites, buildings, and objects.

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A wealth of art and architectural treasures survive from Ancient Egypt—a civilization that endured from the fourth millennium B.C. to the conquest of Alexander the Great. In this book, Ancient Egyptian monuments, their decorations, and many other works of art are reproduced in more than four hundred beautiful illustrations.

The Ancient Egyptians in their tombs attempted to recreate life for the dead in a naturalistic way, often against the background of the landscape in which they lived. This book shows the tombs at Thebes, including the treasure-filled burial place of Tutankhamen, the temples of Luxor and Karnak, and the palaces of Akhenaten at Tell el Amarna and of Amenhotep III at Thebes. It also presents many revealing portraits depicting a range of subjects from the kings and queens who built the pyramids at Giza and Saqqara to their own civil servants.

Many works reproduced in black-and-white in the print version of the book have been replaced with high-quality color illustrations in this electronic version.

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Yale University Press/Pelican History of Art

Virtually all the masterpieces of Islamic art—the Alhambra, the Taj Mahal, and the Tahmasp Shahnama—were produced during the period from the Mongol conquests in the early thirteenth century to the advent of European colonial rule in the nineteenth. This important book surveys the architecture and arts of the traditional Islamic lands during this era.

Conceived as a sequel to The Art and Architecture of Islam: 650–1250, by Richard Ettinghausen and Oleg Grabar, the book follows the general format of the first volume, with chronological and regional divisions and architecture treated separately from the other arts. The authors describe over two hundred works of Islamic art of this period and also investigate broader social and economic contexts, considering such topics as function, patronage, and meaning. They discuss, for example, how the universal caliphs of the first six centuries gave way to regional rulers and how, in this new world order, Iranian forms, techniques, and motifs played a dominant role in the artistic life of most of the Muslim world; the one exception was the Maghrib, an area protected from the full brunt of the Mongol invasions, where traditional models continued to inspire artists and patrons. By the sixteenth century, say the authors, the eastern Mediterranean under the Ottomans and the area of northern India under the Mughals had become more powerful, and the Iranian models of early Ottoman and Mughal art gradually gave way to distinct regional and imperial styles. The authors conclude with a provocative essay on the varied legacies of Islamic art in Europe and the Islamic lands in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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On May 1, 1780, England’s Royal Academy of Arts opened its twelfth annual exhibition, the first to be held in the magnificent rooms of William Chambers’s newly built Somerset House. For the next fifty-seven years, the Great Room of Somerset House effectively defined the center of the London art world--the place where viewers had to see and be seen, and where artists fiercely vied for the attention of potential buyers. Such great exhibition performers as Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Lawrence, John Constable, J. M. W. Turner, and David Wilkie sharpened their skills during these stimulating decades. In this extensively illustrated book, seventeen renowned experts revisit and assess the Somerset House years, a period of great achievement and central importance in the history of British art.

The book’s contributors view the Somerset House phenomenon from a broad range of perspectives. They deal with the physical nature of the exhibitions, the audience, the role of the press, the Royal Academy’s place within the larger world of urban entertainments, and how the conditions of display shaped and even transformed patterns of art production. In addition, they explore such topics as the tactics of exhibitors in different genres of painting, the exhibition histories of works in other media, and the impact on foreign artists and observers of an increasingly self-confident national school of British art.

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For all those interested in the relationship between ideas and the built environment, John Onians provides a lively illustrated account of the range of meanings that Western culture has assigned to the Classical orders. Onians shows that during the 2,000 years from their first appearance in ancient Greece through their codification in Renaissance Italy, the orders — the columns and capitals known as Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Tuscan, and Composite — were made to serve expressive purposes, engaging the viewer in a continuing visual dialogue.

To appreciate England’s earliest Gothic buildings and art—the great cathedrals at Canterbury, Lincoln, Salisbury, and Wells and contemporary Gothic texts and images—it is necessary to understand the religious and ethical ideals of the individuals and communities who sponsored them. Paul Binski’s fascinating new book offers a radical new perspective on English art, architecture, social formation, and religious imagination during this pivotal period.

Binski reveals that the Church, although authoritarian and undergoing reform, was able to come to terms with new developments in society and technology as well as with the fact of social and religious diversity. He explains how varying ideals of personal sanctity were bound up with radical new notions of leadership, personal ethics, and styles of religious devotion and how ideas of reform of worship, personal conduct, and art affected the community at large.

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In 1638, the great artist-architect Gianlorenzo Bernini began one of the most ambitious architectural projects of his career: to design and construct massive twin bell towers atop St. Peter’s basilica at the Vatican. But the project failed spectacularly. Bernini’s reputation was permanently tarnished, and the scandal of the bell towers sparked a controversy that persists to this day. What happened? Who was responsible? How did events unfold in this dramatic episode of architectural history?

This engaging book tells the complete story of the bell towers for the first time. Presenting a wealth of new visual and documentary evidence, Sarah McPhee reconstructs the entire affair, the architectural and political milieu, the evolution of the designs, and the varying influences of all those involved in the project. McPhee examines the multiple constraints under which Bernini worked, including the ambitions of the pope, the criticisms of rival architects, the financial and political constraints of the building committee, the monumental history of the basilica, and the geology of the site. She reinterprets Bernini’s role as architect and shows convincingly that the failure of the bell tower was not Bernini’s own. Instead, it was the failure of the institution of the Vatican, driven by liturgical and political imperatives, that doomed the project despite the architect’s heroic efforts.

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This groundbreaking study investigates the early architecture of the Fatimids, an Ismaili Shi‘i Muslim dynasty that dominated the Mediterranean world from the 10th to the 12th century. This period, considered a golden age of multicultural and interfaith tolerance, witnessed the construction of iconic structures, including Cairo’s al-Azhar and al-Hakim mosques and crucial renovations to Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock and Aqsa Mosque. However, it also featured large-scale destruction of churches under the notorious reign of al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, most notably the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. Jennifer A. Pruitt offers a new interpretation of these and other key moments in the history of Islamic architecture, using newly available medieval primary sources by Ismaili writers and rarely considered Arabic Christian sources. Building the Caliphate contextualizes early Fatimid architecture within the wider Mediterranean and Islamic world and demonstrates how rulers manipulated architectural form and urban topographies to express political legitimacy on a global stage.

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Archaeological and historical scholarship completed over the past decade has revealed much about the built environments of slavery and the daily lives of enslaved workers in North America. Cabin, Quarter, Plantation is the first book to take this new research into account and comprehensively examine the architecture and landscapes of enslavement on plantations and farms.

This important work brings together the best writing in the field, including classic pieces on slave landscapes by W. E. B. Du Bois and Dell Upton, alongside new essays on such topics as the building methods that Africans brought to the American South and information about slave family units and spiritual practices that can be gathered from archaeological remains. Through deep analysis of the built environment the authors invite us to reconsider antebellum buildings, landscapes, cabins, yards, and garden plots, and what these sites can teach us about the real conditions of enslavement. The starting point in any study of slavery and the built environment, this anthology makes essential contributions to our understanding of American slavery and to the fields of landscape history and architectural history.

The essay by Cheryl Janifer LaRoche in this volume has been revised and expanded for the A&AePortal.

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“Francesco Dal Co has reconstructed an incredible adventure and his account is revelatory. Upon reading it, I realized many things that I had personally experienced but had never before understood.”—Renzo Piano


The Centre Georges Pompidou, also called Beaubourg, is today considered an icon of contemporary Paris, the quintessence of a modern building, and a model for what a museum can be. In 1971, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, together with the engineering firm Ove Arup & Partners, won an international architecture competition with their innovative and irreverent design. Completed in 1977, the building was at first received skeptically by critics, yet it was quickly embraced by the public as a beloved monument of the modern city of Paris. This lively intellectual biography of the building explores its history and the reasons for its success, from its genesis as a politically calculated response to Paris’s turbulent 1968 student protests to the role played by architects in its construction, as well as the historical influences and the engineering solutions that inform its design. A key reason for the Centre Pompidou’s success indeed lies in its ability to channel architectural memory, connecting it powerfully to Paris’s historic urban fabric. This essential text on one of the twentieth century’s most significant buildings is accompanied by a portfolio of rare drawings and photographs. 

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Written with an international perspective that encourages cross-cultural comparisons, leading architectural and urban historian Eric Mumford presents a comprehensive survey of urbanism and urban design since the industrial revolution. Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, technical, social, and economic developments set cities and the world’s population on a course of massive expansion. Mumford recounts how key figures in design responded to these changing circumstances with both practicable proposals and theoretical frameworks, ultimately creating what are now mainstream ideas about how urban environments should be designed, as well as creating the field called “urbanism.” He then traces the complex outcomes of approaches that emerged in European, American, and Asian cities.

This erudite and insightful book addresses the modernization of the traditional city, including mass transit and sanitary sewer systems, building legislation, and model tenement and regional planning approaches. It also examines the urban design concepts of groups such as CIAM (International Congresses of Modern Architecture) and Team 10, and their adherents and critics, including those of the Congress for the New Urbanism, as well as efforts toward ecological urbanism. Highlighting built as well as unbuilt projects, Mumford offers a sweeping guide to the history of designers’ efforts to shape cities.

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Peter Eisenman has been an innovative presence in the field of architecture and architectural theory for more than thirty years. Architect, educator, founder and director of the Institute for Architecture and Urbanism, he has given definition to the principal debates on the architecture of our past, present, and future. In this remarkable collection, nineteen of his most important essays are presented together for the first time. Generously illustrated and with a new introduction by the author, these writings assemble the ideas that both set and provoked contemporary architectural practice and theory.

This collection ranges from comprehensive theoretical analyses to close readings of Eisenman’s own work and that of such architects as Andrea Palladio, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Alison and Peter Smithson, James Stirling, Philip Johnson, and John Hedjuk. Providing new perspectives on these architects and on Eisenman’s own methodologies, these writings present an insider’s appraisal of the polemics that have defined architecture over the past half century and that continue as one of the major ongoing forces in the discourse today.

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Le Corbusier, the most influential architect of the twentieth century, died in 1965 only weeks after completing Mise au point, his last opus in the form of autobiographical reflections. Published posthumously, it is a curious and cryptic text, yet it sheds an important light on the great artist’s mind and temperament. This book is the first English translation of Mise au point, the first illustrated critical bilingual edition, and the first attempt to integrate this document into Le Corbusier’s life as a whole, especially its final embittered years.

In an insightful introduction and in annotations, Ivan Žaknić shows how the themes of the text echo the contradictions of Le Corbusier’s personality: determined to rebuke society and yet constantly courting its approval; devoted to serving the public and yet returning again and again to a solitary monastic ideal; distrusting professional institutions, the academy, and the government and yet stung by their willingness to pass him by. Žaknić links the themes of this text with Le Corbusier’s passion for certain literary works, especially Don Quixote, and emphasizes the architect’s many philosophical formulas for coming to terms with death—first that of his beloved wife and then his own. Including a revealing interview granted by Le Corbusier in the final months of his life, the volume is important for students of Le Corbusier’s art, architecture, and urban planning, as well as by those interested in modernism and twentieth-century culture.

This classic work on the nature of early Islamic art has now been brought up to date in order to take into consideration material that has recently come to light. In a new chapter, Oleg Grabar develops alternate models for the formation of Islamic art, tightens its chronology, and discusses its implications for the contemporary art of the Muslim world.

2nd revised, enlarged edition

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In the late 19th century, a centuries-old preference for highly ornamented architecture gave way to a budding Modernism of clean lines and unadorned surfaces. At the same moment, everyday objects—cups, saucers, chairs, and tables—began to receive critical attention.

Alina Payne addresses this shift, arguing for a new understanding of the genealogy of architectural modernism: rather than the well-known story in which an absorption of technology and mass production created a radical aesthetic that broke decisively with the past, Payne argues for a more gradual shift, as the eloquence of architectural ornamentation was taken on by objects of daily use. As she demonstrates, the work of Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier should be seen as the culmination of a conversation about ornament dating as far back as the Renaissance. Payne looks beyond the usual suspects of philosophy and science to establish theoretical catalysts for the shift from ornament to object in the varied fields of anthropology and ethnology; art history and the museum; and archaeology and psychology.

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By the 18th century, the Mughal Empire was well beyond its so-called golden age. Its control of the Indian subcontinent was increasingly threatened by regional Indian states, as well as by the encroaching British Empire. In response to a rapidly changing sociopolitical landscape, the Mughal emperors used architecture to harness their illustrious past and stage cultural authority for contemporary audiences. Chanchal Dadlani provides the first in-depth look at this crucial period of architectural history. Discussing a rich array of built forms and urban spaces—from grand imperial mosques to Delhi’s bustling thoroughfares—the volume sheds light on long-overlooked buildings. It also explores representations of architectural monuments that circulated in the form of building plans, manuscript paintings, and postcards. Ultimately, the book reveals how Mughal architects, artists, and patrons built on the cultural legacy of their imperial predecessors to create the very concept of a historical style identifiable as Mughal.

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Between 1700 and 1830, men and women in the English-speaking territories framing the Atlantic gained unprecedented access to material things. The British Atlantic was an empire of goods, held together not just by political authority and a common language, but by a shared material culture nourished by constant flows of commodities. Diets expanded to include exotic luxuries such as tea and sugar, the fruits of mercantile and colonial expansion. Homes were furnished with novel goods, like clocks and earthenware teapots, the products of British industrial ingenuity. This groundbreaking book compares these developments in Britain and North America, bringing together a multi-disciplinary group of scholars to consider basic questions about women, men, and objects in these regions. In asking who did the shopping, how things were used, and why they became the subject of political dispute, the essays show the profound significance of everyday objects in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.

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Robert Adam was one of the greatest British architects of the later eighteenth century. So widespread was his influence as a decorator and furniture designer that his name has become a household word. But it is the synthesis of architecture, planning, and decoration that stands at the heart of Adam’s achievement, as Eileen Harris shows in this enlightening book. She considers in detail the interaction of each of these elements in nineteen of Adam’s most accomplished interior projects, including some of the most famous British country houses and London town houses.

Most of Adam’s enormous body of work was in preexisting houses; the challenges of remodeling stimulated his inventive imagination, and he became a master at turning awkward situations to advantage. Harris has mined archival sources, including the large collection of drawings from the Adam office at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, and fully examined the houses themselves to discover exactly what Adam did in each project and why. In her detailed discussions of the planning, decoration, ceilings, carpets, chimney pieces, and furniture of such interiors as those at Kedleston, Syon House, Osterley Park, Newby Hall, Culzean Castle, and Home and Lansdowne Houses in London, Harris uncovers the full extent of Adam’s prodigious achievements.

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Winner of the 2020 Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award, sponsored by the Society of Architectural Historians


With lines extending from Bosnia to Baghdad to Medina, the Ottoman Railway Network (1868–1919) was the pride of the empire and its ultimate emblem of modernization—yet it was largely designed and bankrolled by German corporations. This exemplifies a uniquely ambiguous colonial condition in which the interests of Germany and the Ottoman Empire were in constant flux. German capitalists and cultural figures sought influence in the Near East, including access to archaeological sites such as Tell Halaf and Mshatta. At the same time, Ottoman leaders and laborers urgently pursued imperial consolidation. Germany and the Ottoman Railways explores the impact of these political agendas as well as the railways’ impact on the built environment. Relying on a trove of previously unpublished archival materials, including maps, plans, watercolors, and photographs, author Peter H. Christensen also reveals the significance of this major infrastructure project for the budding disciplines of geography, topography, art history, and archaeology.

Considered the crowning achievement of Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan is often called iconic. But it is in fact iconoclastic, standing in stark contrast to the surrounding metropolis and setting a new standard for the postwar art museum. Commissioned to design the building in 1943 by the museum’s founding curator, Baroness Hilla von Rebay, Wright established residence in the Plaza Hotel in order to oversee the project. Over the next 17 years, Wright continuously clashed with his clients over the cost and the design, a conflict that extended to the city of New York and its cultural establishment.

Against all odds, Wright held fast to his radical design concept of an inverted ziggurat and spiraling ramp, built with a continuous beam—a shape recalling the form of an hourglass. Construction was only completed in 1959, six months after Wright’s death. The building’s initial critical response ultimately gave way to near-universal admiration, as it came to be seen as an architectural masterpiece. This essential text, offering a behind-the-scenes story of the Guggenheim along with a careful reading of its architecture, is illustrated with more than 150 images, including plans, drawings, and rare photographs of the building under construction.

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The great Villa constructed by the Emperor Hadrian near Tivoli between A.D. 118 and the 130s is one of the most original monuments in the history of architecture and art. The inspiration for major developments in villa and landscape design from the Renaissance onward, it also influenced such eminent twentieth-century architects as Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn. In this beautiful book, two distinguished architectural historians describe and interpret the Villa as it existed in Roman times and track its extraordinary effect on architects and artists up to the present day.

William L. MacDonald and John A. Pinto begin by evaluating the numerous buildings comprising the complex, and then describe the art, decorated surfaces, gardens, waterworks, and life at the Villa. The authors then turn to the ways the Villa influenced writers, artists, architects, and landscape designers from the fifteenth century to the present. They discuss, for example, Piranesi's archaeological, architectural, and graphic Villa studies in the eighteenth century; connections between Hadrian's Villa and the English landscape garden; the array of European verbal and artistic depictions of the Villa; and architectural studies of the Villa by twentieth-century Americans.

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The painter, designer, and architect Henry van de Velde (1863–1957) played a crucial role in expanding modernist aesthetics beyond Paris and beyond painting. Opposing growing nationalism around 1900, he sought to make painting the basis of an aesthetic that transcended boundaries between the arts and between nations through his work in Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Van de Velde’s designs for homes, museums, and theaters received international recognition. The artist, often associated with the Art Nouveau and Jugendstil, developed a style of abstraction that he taught in his School of Applied Arts in Weimar, the immediate precursor of and model for the Bauhaus. As a leading member of the German Werkbund, he helped shaped the fields of modern architecture and design. This long-awaited book, the first major work on van de Velde in English, firmly positions him as one of the twentieth century’s most influential artists and an essential voice within the modern movement.

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