Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: Cubism and Abstract Art: Painting, Sculpture, Constructions, Photography, Architecture, Industrial Art, Theatre, Films, Posters, Typography (1936)

The catalogue of the first MoMA’s retrospective of modernism, held 2 March-19 April 1936, laid the theoretical foundation of the museum. Its jacket contains a notorious chart of modernist art history, the Diagram of Stylistic Evolution from 1890 until 1935.

“The catalogue remains an important historical document (as does that for Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism). It set abstraction within a formalist framework that—ignoring the intellectual byways of French symbolism, German idealism, and Russian Marxism of the previous thirty years—was shaped by the scientific climate that had started a century before. … The exhibition together with the widespread dissemination of its influential catalogue, established Cubism as the central issue of early modernism, abstraction as the goal.” (Sybil Gordon Kantor, 2003)

The exhibition later traveled to another 7 cities: San Francisco, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Baltimore, Providence, and Grand Rapids.

Publisher Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1936
249 pages
via MoMA

Commentary: Meyer Schapiro (Marxist Quarterly, 1937), Susan Noyes Platt (Art Journal, 1988), Astrit Schmidt Burkhardt (Word & Image, 2000).

Publisher (incl. master checklist and press releases)
WorldCat

PDF (47 MB)

Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller: The Art of Design Science (1999)

“‘Bucky’ was one of the most revolutionary technological visionaries of this century. As an architect, engineer, entrepreneur, poet, he was a quintessentially American, self-made man. But he was also an outsider: a technologist with a poet’s imagination who already developed theories of environmental control in the thirties (“more with less”) and anticipated the globalization of our planet (“think global – act local”).

This visual reader documents and examines Fuller’s theories, ideas, designs, and projects. It also takes an analytical look at his ideology of technology as the panacea. With numerous illustrations, many published here for the first time, as well as texts by Fuller and the editors.

The publication presents Buckminster Fuller’s creations as a dazzling expression of this unconditionally optimistic technocrat whose vision of driverless Spaceship Earth led him to examine the principles of maximizing effects in the most diverse sectors of design and construction.”

Edited by Joachim Krausse and Claude Lichtenstein
Translated by Steven Lindberg and Julia Thorson
Publisher Lars Müller, Baden, 1999
ISBN 3907044886, 9783907044889
528 pages
via ExP

Review: John Martinson (Geographical Review 2001).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (no OCR, 68 MB)

ARPA Journal, 4: Instruments of Service (2016)

ARPA Journal is a biannual digital publication that serves as a public forum for debate on applied research practices in architecture.

This issue questions the status of the instrument and of service. The articles explore spaces of encounter between “tangible and intangible creative work” in design practice, business models, new forms of representation and activism.

With contributions by Denise Scott Brown, Orit Halpern, Curt Gambetta, Alan Smart, Annabel Wharton, Francesca Hughes, Magdalena Miłosz, Filip, Wendy W Fok, J. Meejin Yoon and Eric Howeler, Michelle Fornabai, Ryan John King and Ekaterina Zavyalova, Lori Brown, Mustafa Faruki, Behnaz Farahi, Anab Jain, Jonathan Sun and Carlo Ratti, McLain Clutter, and Rafi Segal.

Guest Editor: Jennifer W. Leung
Based at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, New York
Published May 2016
Open access

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