Building-Art Modern Architecture Under Cultural Construction

Building-Art is an anthology of essays by noted critic Joseph Masheck. Considering topics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture, its theory and practice, as well as selected achievements by such great modernists as Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Louis Kahn, Masheck also analyses important monuments and architectural ideas of such artists as Giorgio di Chirico and Tony Smith. Contextualising and culturally speculative, these studies address such issues as the distinction between architecture and 'mere' building, and architecture and engineering, frequently drawing the reader into architectural problems that have persisted for at least two centuries. Demonstrating a concern with on-going modernism, Masheck's essays guide the reader through the anti-modernist polemics of the 1970s and 1980s, which are particularly relevant in the light of postmodernism's demise.