Neil Levine - Böcker

An in-depth look at the iconic mid-nineteenth-century building and its construction during a period of revolution and its transformative impact on the history of architecture  Since its completion in 1850, the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève has been heralded as a major forerunner of modern architecture. The architect Henri Labrouste, a product of the École des Beaux-Arts, broke with the reigning neoclassical tradition by expressing on the exterior the building’s internal functions and exposing on the interior the unprecedented iron construction of its reading room. Underlying these radical departures from tradition was a new democratic form of spatial organization appropriate to the new reading public.  Acclaimed architectural historian Neil Levine presents both a building history—discussing the significance of the program, site, prehistory, and building process—and a window into a period of momentous historical change by contextualizing Labrouste’s work within the revolutionary times of the latter part of the July Monarchy and Second Republic in France. He examines how the building communicates a public purpose through its anticlassical, nonhierarchic, egalitarian form and reveals how the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève is the product of a poetic architectural intelligence mixed with radical, democratic ideals.

Critical interpretation meets personal essay in this groundbreaking assessment of Donald Judd’s sculptural workThe Sculpture of Donald Judd is the first chronological study of the artist’s pathbreaking and enormously influential work beginning with his turn from painting to sculpture in 1961–62 until his death in 1994. The analyses of the work, often considered the foundation of Minimalism, are based on close readings, highly attentive to detail and informed by a friendship with the artist. Despite Judd’s refusal to call his work sculpture, this examination deliberately situates it within the history of the medium as a way both to explain its originality and to reveal the evolution of its spatial inventions from a closed, object-oriented model to an open, often polychrome pictorialism.With its personal insights into the artist’s thinking, its attention to the logic of the work’s development, and its more than 150 illustrations, almost all in color, The Sculpture of Donald Judd provides a provocative, eye-opening account by an esteemed art historian that challenges the conventional view, mostly based on the artist’s own writings, of Judd’s celebrated body of work.

Neil Levine's study of the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, beginning with his work in Oak Park in the late 1880s and culminating in the construction of the Guggenheim museum in New York and the Marin County Civic Center in the 1950s, if the first comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the architect's entire career since the opening of the Wright Archives over a decade ago. The most celebrated and prolific of modern architects, Wright built more than four hundred buildings and designed at least twice as many more. The characteristic features of his work--the open plan, dynamic space, fragmented volumes, natural materials, and integral structure--established the basic way that we think about modern architecture. For a general audience, this engaging book provides an introduction to Wright's remarkable accomplishments, as seen against the background of his eventful and often tragic life. For the architect or the architectural historian, it will be an important source of new insights into the development of Wright's whole body of work.It integrates biographical and historical material in a chronologically ordered framework that makes sense of his enormously varied career, and it provides over four hundred illustrations running parallel to the text. Levine conveys the meanings of the continuities and changes that he sees I Wright's architecture and thought by focusing successive chapters on his most significant buildings, such as the Winslow House, Taliesin, Hollyhock House, Fallingwater, Tailsen west, and the Guggenheim Museum. A new understanding of the representational imagery and narrative structure of Wright's work, along with a much-needed reconsideration of its historical and contextual underpinnings, gives this study a unique place in the writings on Wright. In contrast to the emphasis a previous generation of critics and historians placed on Wright's earlier buildings, this book offers a broader perspective that sees Wright's later work as the culmination of his earlier efforts and the basis for a new understanding of the centrality of his career to the evolution of modern architecture as a whole.

Vincent Scully has shaped not only how we view the evolution of architecture in the twentieth century but also the course of that evolution itself. Combining the modes of historian and critic in unique and compelling ways--with an audience that reaches from students and scholars to professional architects and ardent amateurs--Scully has profoundly influenced the way architecture is thought about and made. This extensively illustrated and elegantly designed volume distills Scully's incalculable contribution. Neil Levine, a former student of Scully's, selects twenty essays that reveal the breadth and depth of Scully's work from the 1950s through the 1990s. The pieces are included for their singular contribution to our understanding of modern architecture as well as their relative unavailability to current readers. Levine offers a perceptive overview of Scully's distinguished career and introduces each essay, skillfully setting the scholarly and cultural scene. The selections address almost all of modern architecture's major themes and together go a long way toward defining what constitutes the contemporary experience of architecture and urbanism.Each is characteristically Scully--provocative, yet precise in detail and observation, written with passionate clarity. They document Scully's seminal views on the relationship between the natural and the built environment and trace his progressively intense concern with the fabric of the street and of our communities. The essays also highlight Scully's engagement with the careers of so many of the twentieth century's most significant architects, from Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn to Robert Venturi. In the tradition of great intellectual biographies, this finely made book chronicles our most influential architectural historian and critic. It is a gift to architecture and its history.

This is the first book devoted to Frank Lloyd Wright's designs for remaking the modern city. Stunningly comprehensive, The Urbanism of Frank Lloyd Wright presents a radically new interpretation of the architect's work and offers new and important perspectives on the history of modernism. Neil Levine places Wright's projects, produced over more than fifty years, within their historical, cultural, and physical contexts, while relating them to the theory and practice of urbanism as it evolved over the twentieth century. Levine overturns the conventional view of Wright as an architect who deplored the city and whose urban vision was limited to a utopian plan for a network of agrarian communities he called Broadacre City. Rather, Levine reveals Wright's larger, more varied, interesting, and complex urbanism, demonstrated across the span of his lengthy career.Beginning with Wright's plans from the late 1890s through the early 1910s for reforming residential urban neighborhoods, mainly in Chicago, and continuing through projects from the 1920s through the 1950s for commercial, mixed-use, civic, and cultural centers for Chicago, Madison, Washington, Pittsburgh, and Baghdad, Levine demonstrates Wright's place among the leading contributors to the creation of the modern city. Wright's often spectacular designs are shown to be those of an innovative precursor and creative participant in the world of ideas that shaped the modern metropolis. Lavishly illustrated with drawings, plans, maps, and photographs, this book features the first extensive new photography of materials from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives. The Urbanism of Frank Lloyd Wright will serve as one of the most important books on the architect for years to come.

Among the general public, Frank Lloyd Wright remains the best-known American architect of the twentieth century. And yet his larger-than-life profile in the popular realm contrasts sharply with his near invisibility in academic and professional circles. In Rethinking Frank Lloyd Wright, Neil Levine and Richard Longstreth have assembled a group of eminent scholars to address this most puzzling paradox of the great architect’s career.In a series of engaging and well-illustrated essays, the contributors draw on their wide-ranging understanding of modern architecture to reveal the ways in which Wright continues to play an instrumental role in domestic and international spheres, making the case for reevaluating his popular and professional reputations. Prompted by the transfer of the architect’s archive from its home at Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona, to the Avery Library at Columbia University and the Museum of Modern Art, this volume revisits Wright’s relevance for a contemporary audience.ContributorsBarry Bergdoll, Columbia University · Daniel Bluestone, Boston University · Jean-Louis Cohen, New York University · Cammie McAtee, independent scholar · Neil Levine, Harvard University · Dietrich Neumann, Brown University · Timothy M. Rohan, University of Massachusetts Amherst · Richard Longstreth, George Washington University · Jack Quinan, University at Buffalo · Alice Thomine-Berrada, École des Beaux-Arts

Finally, friends of ED have produced a beautiful full color companion to last years New Masters of Flash! Each New Masters volume delves deep into the heart of the year's most innovative Flash design and brings you the new New Masters' inspiration and technique. Building to form a unique collection of Flash Art, the New Masters series tests your Flash skills, offers inspiration and insight, while at the same time forms an in-depth chronicle of the best of motion graphics. New Masters: Flash Annual 2002 gives competent web artists inspiration on cutting-edge Flash design techniques, as well as serious tutorial information on how to build top class effects. The format builds on the best of the original best-selling volume, New Masters of Flash, while improving in such areas as generic customisable code examples. The talents, the inspirations and effects are all of the moment and represent the mature and expert deployment of the staggering new capabilities of Flash 5 ActionScript. This book offers immediate insight into the design approaches of 15 globally known designers. There is step-by-step deconstruction of cutting-edge design effects, both from the original designer p.o.v PLUS an editorial commentary. Included is a CD-ROM with animated tutorials and video interviews with authors. From the Publisher Flash has upped the standard for web motion graphics and has been welcomed with open arms on account of its powerful new Actionscripting capabilities. Following on from the phenomenal success of New Masters of Flash, the Flash Annual will bring together a new collection of the hottest Flash design talents on the planet, all of whom have grabbed attention in the preceding year. From the Author The artists collected in New Masters: Flash Annual 2002 are a collection of the new wave of showcase web artists from across the world. They all have a worldwide following and a reputation for using their designs to push Flash 5 capabilities to new limits. About the Author The artists collected in New Masters: Flash Annual 2002 are a collection of the new wave of showcase web artists from across the world. They all have a worldwide following and a reputation for using their designs to push Flash 5 capabilities to new limits.