Transformations in Modern Architecture by Arthur Drexler (The Museum of Modern Art 1979) is an exhibition book on the developments and emerging trends in modern architecture between late-1950s and 1970s. The book pays special attention to the developments in sculptural form, structure, elements, and vernacular details with dedicated chapters about architects Louis Kahn, James Stirling, and Robert Venturi.
Modern architecture is likely to prevail because quite often it produces beautiful buildings. It is the known style, as securely entrenched as any academic mode of the nineteenth century. Abstraction still corresponds to some deeply felt need of our culture, even though it can never subdue the need for enrichment and specificity. If there is to be a major shift in sensibility it will have to overcome psychological barriers. Enrichment of form as it applies to buildings, interior decor, and furniture design need represent no great problem, but typewriters, cars, and airplanes are not so tractable. Neither are those architectural situations which must accommodate technology’s more intimidating artifacts. A Neoclassical airport is imaginable, perhaps, but not without a considerable rearrangement of our prejudices.
Whatever its excesses or deficiencies, modernism has valued buildings and artifacts that are made well and do what is required of them. In that sense it has been against interpretation, preferring instead the self-evident fitness of things. As interpretation is again required, it will collide with fitness. We are still dealing with the conflict between art and technology that beset the nineteenth century, and which the modern movement expected to resolve.
– Arthur Drexler, Transformations in Modern Architecture (The Museum of Modern Art, 1979), p. 16–17
The text is in English. The book is richly lavishly illustrated with black-and-white photographs.
Our copy in stock is in nice condition. The pages are clean, no markings. The glueing of the binding is still firm; only the spine has been detached from the volume. The covers show some usual traces of shelf wear and use.
