Barry Bergdoll – författare

This comprehensive examination of eighteenth and nineteenth-century architecture explores its extreme diversity within the context of tremendous social, economic and political upheaval. Bergdolls offers a penetrating analysis of the very ways issues of style functioned to make architecture one of the most vitally experimental of art forms in a period of sweeping political, social, and economic change. Never before had the functional requirements and expressive capacities of architecture been tested so thoroughly and with such diversity of invention. Bergdoll traces this experimentation in a broad range of contexts, focusing in particular on the relation of architectural design to new theories of history, new categories of scientific inquiry, and the broadening audience for architecture in this period of transformation. Unlike traditional surveys with long lists of buildings and architects, the themes are elucidated by in-depth coverage of key buildings which in turn are situated in both their local and European context.

The first in-depth study of American artist Alan Dunn (1900–1974), whose incisive cartoons mocked twentieth-century architecture and urban environments, expanding the field of architectural criticism.Drawing on his pioneering expertise in the relationship between graphic satire and architecture, Gabriele Neri retraces Alan Dunn’s path from painter to renowned cartoonist, offering an unconventional perspective on architectural and urban transformations—and on their perception within society.Featuring 200 carefully selected images, including Dunn’s correspondence, preliminary sketches, unpublished cartoons, watercolors, and rare photographs, this book demonstrates the critical potential of caricature and cartoons for architectural history. It also reveals the complex intersections of architecture with media, publishing, commerce, society, art, and politics.Among the thousands of cartoons and illustrations Dunn created for The New Yorker, Architectural Record, and other periodicals, many addressed key themes such as the evolving skyline of American metropolis; the appearance of controversial buildings; housing models; technological innovations; the relationship between architects, clients, and other figures in the construction industry; the protection of built heritage; and the obsessions, oddities, foibles, and even misdeeds of the architectural world.As Lewis Mumford once wrote of Dunn: “Shall I say that he is obviously a better architect than the architects whose fashionable clichés and grim follies he exposes? Or shall I say that his urbane satiric style, deft but merciless, puts him in a class by himself; for this is what has been missing from contemporary criticism in all the arts. All this is true; but it is not enough.”

An exploration of the role of graphic work in the career of one of the nineteenth century’s most influential architects  Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879) was nineteenth-century France’s most prominent architect and restorer. This groundbreaking study examines how he used drawing and printmaking as a mode of seeing and thinking and as a means to intensify relationships by capturing the vitality of historical worlds and hidden analogies between human culture and the natural realm.  Making sense of Viollet-le-Duc’s vast graphic production, scholars consider his imaginative recreations of the most minute aspects of medieval warfare; his approach to the practical tasks of restoring very complex medieval monuments; his experiments in new means of publicly diffusing architectural ideas in the yearly Parisian salons, in didactic manuals, and in children’s books; and even a fantastic project to restitute the original structure of the formidable massif of Mont Blanc. The gamut of techniques employed by Viollet-le-Duc stretches from large painted tableaux to lithographs, steel engravings, woodcuts, gouaches, tracings, and full-scale details.  This generously illustrated volume offers an unparalleled window into the architect’s working process and explores how his mastery of the graphic arts helped him harness the power of the press to disseminate architectural knowledge and spread ideologies based on antagonism, most notably nationalism and racism.  Distributed for Bard Graduate Center  Exhibition Schedule:  Bard Graduate Center, New York(January 28–May 24, 2026)

A timely reevaluation and synthesis of this ecologically minded trailblazer and vibrantly interdisciplinary figure of contemporary design.Famously labeled the “father, poet, and prophet” of green architecture and a proponent of the idea that any project in architecture or design must present new or better ways of living or be deemed immoral, Emilio Ambasz is an award-winning architect, industrial designer, and protean maker of forms. He has invented highly efficient engines, modular furniture, streetlights, flexible pens, expandable suitcases, ergonomic door handles, wrist computers, and 3D posters. In collaboration with Giancarlo Piretti, he created the Vertebra chair, the first automatic ergonomic chair in the world, now part of the permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Long a pioneer in architecture, Ambasz has retained a belief in the environment, or rather the larger ecology, as fundamental in viewing the world: as the author notes in the introduction, “his philosophy of ‘green over gray’ may often have fallen on deaf ears at the height of Postmodernism, but it today seems profoundly relevant.” And it is in the context of today that the book considers his work and its three main areas of concentration—architecture, industrial design, curating—with an aim of shining a light on the interdisciplinary nature of the work as a whole. Featuring built and manufactured designs that have achieved iconic fame and challenged others to approach new ways of reconciling architecture and nature, the book also considers Ambasz’s work as curator at MoMA and his ongoing influence and legacy.

Published for the 2026 bicentennial celebration of the artist’s birth, this landmark volume celebrates Church’s iconic masterpiece of American art and design—inviting readers into a world where creativity and nature converge.Showcasing one of the most breathtaking artist-designed homes and landscapes in the United States, the book immerses readers in the sweeping vision of Hudson River School artist Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900), who transformed 250 acres overlooking the Hudson River into a harmonious blend of art, architecture, and panoramic scenery. The volume features a rich selection of Church’s paintings, placing Olana in dialogue with the artist’s studio practice and pictorial imagination.Timed with Church 200, the nationwide celebration of his birth, this volume places Olana within a global lineage of artist-architect-designers while offering fresh scholarship that renews its significance today. Newly commissioned photography captures Olana’s dramatic views, Persian-inspired architecture, curving carriage roads, and the newly opened Frederic Church Center, while rare historic photographs reveal Olana at the end of Church’s life.A highlight of the book is the revival of Church’s living landscape: the replanting of birches, hickories, and other native species has restored the rich woodlands that frame the landscape. The result is a dynamic environment that reflects Church’s original vision—an immersive, ever-changing masterwork where art, nature, ecology, and history meet.

"The Bauhaus, the school of art and design founded in Germany in 1919 and shut down by the Nazis in 1933, brought together artists, architects and designers - among them Anni and Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, Lyonel Feininger, Walter Gropius, Johannes Itten, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Lilly Reich, Oskar Schlemmer, Gunta Stolzl - in an extraordinary conversation on the nature of art in the industrial age. Aiming to rethink the form of modern life, the Bauhaus became thesite of a dazzling array of experiments in the visual arts that have profoundly shaped the world today. Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity, published to accompany a major multimedia exhibition, is The Museum of Modern Art's first comprehensive treatment of the subject since its famous Bauhaus exhibition of 1938, and offers a new generational perspective on the twentieth century's most influential experiment in artistic education." "Organized in collaboration with the three major Bauhaus collections in Germany (the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau and the Klassic Stiftung Weimar), Bauhaus 1919-1933 examines the extraordinarily broad spectrum of the school's products, including industrial design, furniture, architecture, graphics,photography, textiles, ceramics, theater and costume design, painting and sculpture. Many of the objects discussed and illustrated here have rarely if ever been seen or published outside Germany. Featuring approximately 400 color plates, richly complemented by documentary images, Bauhaus 1919-1933 includes two overarching essays by the exhibition's curators, Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, that present new perspectives on the Bauhaus. Shorter essays by more than 20 leading scholars apply contemporary viewpoints to 30 key Bauhaus objects, and an illustrated narrative chronology provides a dynamic glimpse of the Bauhaus' lived history."--BOOK JACKET.

Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) is celebrated as a furniture designer, teacher, and architect who changed the American house after his emigration from Hungary to the U.S.A. in 1937. More recently historians, architects, and-with the reopening in New York of the great megalith of his Whitney Museum as the Met Breuer-a larger public are gaining new insights into the cities and large-scale buildings Breuer planned. Often seen as a pioneer of a "Brutalist modernism" of reinforced concrete, Breuer might best be understood through the lens of the changing institutional structures in and for which he worked, a vantage developed in the fresh approaches gathered here in essays by a group of younger scholars. These essays draw on an abundance of newly available documents held in the Breuer Archive at Syracuse University, now accessible online.

Japanese architect Kengo Kuma and Greek-Israeli photographer Erieta Attali have been working together for over twenty years. Their joint work is characterized by a shared aesthetic understanding of architecture, space, and visual perception. In both Kuma’s buildings and Attali’s photographs, interior and exterior spaces merge and dissolve into one another. Both are united by the idea that spatial experience is fleeting, shaped by the rhythm of the day and the seasons, making built space a medium that expands into the landscape and encourages people to question their notion of spatial boundaries. Attali’s photographs go far beyond documenting architecture. She focuses on the relationship between architecture and the ever-changing environment. Space and landscape are reordered through her visual language. Attali, who began her career as an archaeology and landscape photographer, has created a vast body of work over the past two decades. In this book, congenially designed by Koma Amok, Kuma’s architectural ideas are interpreted by Attali in such a way that the act of photographic translation creates independent works of art that can reveal their full power in this very special book/object. Architectural sketches and quotes by Kuma are embedded in between Attali’s photographs, providing deep insights into the work created over the past twenty years. With an essay by Barry Bergdoll, head of the art history department at Columbia University and former curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, this publication situates the work of Kuma and Attali at the center of contemporary architectural discourse. In addition to well-known buildings, the selection includes a number of smaller, never-before-shown works from Europe, the United States, and Japan. Among them are the Glass Wood House, New Canaan, USA; the Mediation House, Krun, Bavaria, Germany; the Water Glass House, Atami, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan; Sunny Hills, Tokyo, Japan; and the Coeda House, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan.

This beautifully illustrated publication celebrates the first-ever restoration of the exterior of J. Pierpont Morgan’s Library — the historic heart of the Morgan Library & Museum. Morgan’s Library has stood as a significant cultural landmark ever since it was commissioned by J. Pierpont Morgan for personal use at the start of the 20th century. Its transition to a public institution in the twenties has lent to an even greater flood of admiration and patronage, by both local and international audiences. The elegant design by Charles Follen McKim stands as one of the finest examples of neoclassical architecture in the United States, significant for its distinctive Italian Renaissance style and its opulent interior period rooms. The site has been designated both a National Historic Landmark and a New York City landmark, and it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The book, following on the heels of the completed restoration, will punctuate this latest milestone in the building’s storied history.