Barry Bergdoll - Böcker

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.

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)

Famously labelled the father, poet, and prophet of green architecture and a vocal 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, streetlamps, flexible pens, expandable suitcases, ergonomic door handles, wrist-computers, dental hygiene systems, and 3D posters. He created the Vertebra chair, the first ever automatic, ergonomic chair in the world, now part of the permanent collections at MoMA and The Met in New York. In architecture he has long been a pioneer, and has retained a belief in the environment, or rather the larger ecology, as fundamental in viewing the world: as Professor Bergdoll notes of Ambasz in his 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 the work of Emilio Ambasz 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 notably the Prefectural Hall at Fukuoka, Japan, and the conservatory buildings of the San Antonio Botanical Garden, in addition to his own unique house outside Seville in Spain the book also considers Ambasz s work as curator at MoMA and his ongoing influence and legacy.

Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream is an exploration of new architectural possibilities for American cities and suburbs in the aftermath of the recent foreclosure crisis in the United States. During the summer of 2011, five interdisciplinary teams of architects, urban planners, ecologists, engineers, and landscape designers were enlisted by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and MoMA PS1 to envision new housing infrastructures that could catalyze urban transformation, particularly in the country’s suburbs. Drawing on ideas proposed in The Buell Hypothesis, a research publication by Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, each team focused on a specific ‘mega region’, a metropolitan area between two major cities, to come up with inventive solutions for the future of housing and cities, to be exhibited at MoMA in Spring 2012. This publication presents each of these proposals in detail, through photographs, drawings, and renderings as well as interviews with the team leaders. With essays by Barry Bergdoll, MoMA’s Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, and Reinhold Martin, Director of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center, Foreclosed examines the relationship between land, infrastructures, and urban form in today’s cities and suburbs, and presents a potentially different future for housing in the United States.

In 1955 The Museum of Modern Art staged Latin American Architecture since 1945, a landmark survey of modern architecture in Latin America. Published in conjunction with a new exhibition that revisits the region on the 60th anniversary of that important show, Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980 offers a complex overview of the positions, debates, and architectural creativity from Mexico and Cuba to the Southern Cone between 1955 and the early 1980s. The publication features a wealth of original materials that have never before been brought together to illustrate a period of self-questioning, exploration and complex political shifts that saw the emergence of the notion of Latin America as a landscape of development. Richly illustrated with architectural drawings, vintage photographs, sketches and newly commissioned photographs, the catalogue presents the work of architects who met the challenges of modernization with innovative formal, urbanistic and programmatic solutions. Today, when Latin America is again providing exciting and challenging architecture and urban responses, Latin America in Construction brings this vital post-war period to light.

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.

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.