Hendrik Petrus Berlage: Thoughts on Style, 1886–1909 (1996)

“Looking back to the period around 1910, Mies van der Rohe once commented that there was but a single architect then working on the European architectural scene, “Berlage was a lone giant.”

In parallel activities as both an architect and an architectural philosopher, H. P. Berlage created a series of buildings that witnessed the gestation and birth of architectural Modernism and a body of writings that probed in depth the problems and possibilities of this new style. But whereas his Stock Exchange in Amsterdam, with its rational mastery of materials and space, has long been celebrated for its seminal influence on the architecture of the new century, Berlage’s passionate writings on architecture, which exerted an equal influence on his contemporaries, have often been neglected.

In his wide-ranging critical introduction, Iain Boyd Whyte convincingly demonstrates that one corpus of work cannot be understood without taking into account the other: Berlage’s writings inform his architecture to the same extent that his buildings reflect his probing aesthetic deliberations. Berlage’s principal texts are here brought together in English translation for the first time. Collectively, they present to the English-language reader a new and vital chapter in the history of European modernism.”

Introduction by Iain Boyd Whyte
Translated by Iain Boyd Whyte and Wim de Wit
Publisher Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Santa Monica/CA, 1996
Texts & Documents series
ISBN 0892363339, 9780892363339
331 pages

Review: Suzanne Frank (J Arch Education 1997).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (54 MB)

Sergei Eisenstein: Nonindifferent Nature (1987)

“This is the first publication in English of Eisenstein‘s major theoretical work from the last decade of his life. Almost completed but unrevised at the time of his death in 1948, it comprises three articles from 1939-41 rewritten for the book, together with a substantial text from the period 1945-47. More than a treatise of film theory (though its immediate impetus is clearly the films that Eisenstein worked on at this time, Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible Parts I and II), Nonindifferent Nature aspires to the status of a contribution to general aesthetics, and its numerous examples are drawn more from the other arts than from cinema. Indeed, apart from analysing, in retrospect, his own work, Eisenstein scarcely touches on film at all. Instead he deals with the novel (Zola, Tolstoy, Wilkie Collins), painting (El Greco, Chinese landscapes), architecture (Chartres Cathedral, Mayan temples), etching (Piranesi), opera (Wagner), poetry (Pushkin), acting (Frederick Lemaitre), music (Bach, jazz), even cartooning (Saul Steinberg).” (from a review by Russell Campbell)

Translated by Herbert Marshall
Publisher Cambridge University Press, 1987
ISBN 0521324157, 9780521324151
xxv+428 pages
via jchill, land

Reviews: Ronald R. Levaco (Los Angeles Times, 1987), Russell Campbell (New Zealand Slavonic Journal, 1991).

WorldCat

PDF (Introduction missing, 7 MB, no OCR)

Jeffrey Kastner, Brian Wallis (eds.): Land and Environmental Art (1998)

“The traditional landscape genre was radically transformed in the 1960s when many artists stopped merely representing the land and made their mark directly in the environment. Drawn by the vast uncultivated spaces of the desert and mountain as well as post-industrial wastelands, artists such as Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson moved the earth to create colossal primal symbols. Others punctuated the horizon with man-made signposts, such as Christo’s Running Fence or Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field. Journeys became works of art for Richard Long while Dennis Oppenheim and Ana Mendieta immersed their bodies in the contours of the land.

This book traces early developments to the present day, as artists are exploring eco-systems and the interface between industrial, urban and rural cultures.”

Edited by Jeffrey Kastner
Survey by Brian Wallis
Publisher Phaidon Press, 1998
ISBN 0714835145, 9780714835143
304 pages

Review: Boettger (CAA.Reviews, 1999).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (117 MB, no OCR)

For more on land art see Monoskop wiki (includes a select bibliography and collection of links to online documentation of the works by early land artists).