Architecture & Arts 1900/2004: A Century of Creative Projects in Building, Design, Cinema, Painting,Photography, and Sculpture

A new vision of architecture--focused on surface and instability, as opposed to structure and permanence--has dominated the field in recent decades. In a huge, landmark book, Architecture & Arts 1900-2004: A Century of Creative Projects in Building Design, Cinema, Painting, Photography, Sculpture, editor Germano Celant argues that this vision is heavily indebted to influences from visual art, cinema and literature. And the converse is also true, Celant writes. Throughout the 20th century, architecture has been a fruitful subject for artists attracted to the sensory elements and symbolic references of buildings. Celant, an Italian-born art critic, Guggenheim Museum curator and author of many previous books, organized a massive exhibition on the subject of art and architecture in the 1900s for the city of Genoa in 2004.

Originally produced for the exhibition, this hefty volume contains an enormous photo resource--1,000 impeccably reproduced photographs of buildings and artworks by famous and undeservedly obscure artists representing the history of modernism and post-modernism. A 239-page section is entirely devoted to photographs of selected projects by late twentieth-century artists and architects in Europe, the U.S. and Japan. The other noteworthy component of the book is its generous compilation of source material from the worlds of architecture and art--writings by Mies van der Rohe and Paolo Soleri, Fernand Léger and Claes Oldenburg. Readers can also graze on intriguing documents by little-known artists, such as a 1922 manifesto by one Ivo Pannaggi, who wrote, "we [don't] want to make people understand; we want to make them feel." On the other hand, the uniformly pompous style and awkward phrasing of the many contemporary essays originally written in Italian or German suggest that the translators were not equal to the job. Errors also have a way of creeping in when English titles and phrases are translated into Italian and then back into English. The organization of this sprawling volume—most chapters consist of clusters of artists and architects—is also rather mystifying. Viewed purely as a visual reference book, however, it is well worth owning. --Cathy Curtis