If there is anything to be learned from the history of American architecture it is that it reflects the American adventure in creativity and inventiveness, and the desire to be unique and expressive. In The Groundbreakers, Charles E. Dagit, Jr. examines pioneering American architects and the historical events and trends that gave rise to their achievements. These architects, the caliber of Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry, created their own distinct, personal styles, and represented the ...

Few people in the history of art and architecture have planted a seed of inspiration that grew to become a towering oak of lasting influence. There are those, particularly colleagues and students of Louis I. Kahn, who would say that he was one of these people. Certainly Kahn was one of the foremost architects of the twentieth century, designing such famous landmarks as the National Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh; the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California; and the Kimbell Museum in...

Born in Estonia 1901 and brought to America in 1906, the architect Louis Kahn grew up in poverty in Philadelphia. By the time of his mysterious death in 1974, he was widely recognized as one of the greatest architects of his era. Yet this enormous reputation was based on only a handful of masterpieces, all built during the last fifteen years of his life.Wendy Lesser's You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn is a major exploration of the architect's life and work. Kahn, per...

A New York Times Book Review Editor’s ChoiceFinalist for the National Book Critics Circle AwardA Princeton professor-turned-artist recounts her late-in-life career change in this “feisty and delightfully irreverent memoir” about art and coming-of-age in your 60s (Boston Globe).“A glorious achievement . . . a cup of courage for everyone who wants to change their lives.” —Tayari Jones, author of An America...

Winner of the National Award for Arts Writing: “If there were a course in Chelsea Hotel-iana, this would be the textbook” (The New York Times).It’s where Dylan Thomas lived his last days, Bob Dylan wrote Blonde on Blonde, and Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is memorialized by many of its famous inhabitants: Andy Warhol filmed Chelsea Girls there, and Leonard Cohen wrote Chelsea Hotel #2 about his tryst w...

A National Book Critics Circle Finalist for CriticismA deeply Malcolmian volume on painters, photographers, writers, and critics.Janet Malcolm's In the Freud Archives and The Journalist and the Murderer, as well as her books about Sylvia Plath and Gertrude Stein, are canonical in the realm of nonfiction—as is the title essay of this collection, with its forty-one "false starts," or serial attempts to capture the essence of the painter David ...

After critiquing―and infuriating―the art world with The Painted Word, the award-winning author Tom Wolfe shares his less-than-favorable thoughts about modern architecture in From Bauhaus to Our House.In this examination of the strange saga of twentieth-century architecture, Wolfe takes such European architects as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Bauhaus art school founder Walter Gropius to task for their glass-and-steel-box buildings th...

From the Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of How to Be an Artist: a deliciously readable survey of the art world in turbulent timesJerry Saltz is one of our most-watched writers about art and artists, and a passionate champion of the importance of art in our shared cultural life. Since the 1990s he has been an indispensable cultural voice: witty and provocative, he has attracted contemporary readers to fine art as few critics have. An early cha...

The prize-winning scholar's "expert, holistic, down-to-earth guide" to the beauty and function of architecture ( Booklist , starred review).We spend most of our days and nights in buildings. They are the setting of our everyday lives as well as a public art form. Yet architecture remains a mystery to most of us. In How Architecture Works, Witold Rybczynski, a renowned critic and winner of the Vincent Scully Prize f...

How dull plays are killing theatre and what we can do about it.Had I become disenchanted with the form I had once fallen so madly in love with as a pubescent, pimple-faced suburban homo with braces? Maybe theatre was like an all-consuming high school infatuation that now, ten years later, I saw as the closeted balding guy with a beer gut he’d become. There were of course those rare moments of transcendencethat kept me coming back. But why did they come so few a...

H**ot Cold Heavy Light collects 100 writings—some long, some short—that taken together forma group portrait of many of the world’s most significant and interesting artists. From Pablo Picasso to Cindy Sherman, Old Masters to contemporary masters, paintings to comix, and saints to charlatans, Schjeldahl ranges widely through the diverse and confusing art world, an expert guide to a dazzling scene. No other writer enhances the reader’s experience of art in precise, jargon-free prose...