Michelangelo Sabatino

Napoleone Ferrari

Architect and Storyteller

Carlo Mollino

Stephen Fox

Barrie Scardino Bradley

Complex, controversial, and prolific, Howard Barnstone was a central figure in the world of twentieth-century modern architecture. Recognized as Houston’s foremost modern architect in the 1950s, Barnstone came to prominence for his designs with partner Preston M. Bolton, which transposed the rigorous and austere architectural practices of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to the hot, steamy coastal plain of Texas. Barnstone was a man of contradictions—charming and witty but also self-centered, caustic, and abusive—who shaped new settings that were imbued, at once, with spatial calm and emotional intensity. Making Houston Modern explores the provocative architect’s life and work, not only through the lens of his architectural practice but also by delving into his personal life, class identity, and connections to the artists, critics, collectors, and museum directors who forged Houston’s distinctive culture in the postwar era. Edited by three renowned voices in the architecture world, this volume situates Barnstone within the contexts of American architecture, modernism, and Jewish culture to unravel the legacy of a charismatic personality whose imaginative work as an architect, author, teacher, and civic commentator helped redefine architecture in Texas.

The Life and Architecture of Howard Barnstone

Making Houston Modern

Susan Benjamin

The first survey of the classic twentieth-century houses that defined American Midwestern modernism. Famed as the birthplace of that icon of twentieth-century architecture, the skyscraper, Chicago also cultivated a more humble but no less consequential form of modernism--the private residence. Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929-75 explores the substantial yet overlooked role that Chicago and its suburbs played in the development of the modern single-family house in the twentieth century. In a city often associated with the outsize reputations of Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the examples discussed in this generously illustrated book expand and enrich the story of the region's built environment. Authors Susan Benjamin and Michelangelo Sabatino survey dozens of influential houses by architects whose contributions are ripe for reappraisal, such as Paul Schweikher, Harry Weese, Keck & Keck, and William Pereira. From the bold, early example of the "Battledeck House" by Henry Dubin (1930) to John Vinci and Lawrence Kenny's gem the Freeark House (1975), the generation-spanning residences discussed here reveal how these architects contended with climate and natural setting while negotiating the dominant influences of Wright and Mies. They also reveal how residential clients--typically middle-class professionals, progressive in their thinking--helped to trailblaze modern architecture in America. Though reflecting different approaches to site, space, structure, and materials, the examples in Modern in the Middle reveal an abundance of astonishing houses that have never been collected into one study--until now.

Chicago Houses 1929-75

Modern in the Middle

Following Italy's unification in 1861, architects, artists, politicians, and intellectuals engaged in volatile debates over the pursuit of national and regional identity. Growing industrialization and urbanization across the country was changing the physical, economic, and cultural landscape. Yet at the same time there emerged a rediscovery of traditionally built forms and objects created by the agrarian peasantry. Pride in Modesty argues that these ordinary, often anonymous, everyday things inspired and transformed Italian art and architecture from the 1920's to the 1970's. Through in-depth examinations of texts, drawings, and buildings, Michelangelo Sabatino finds that the folk traditions of the pre-industrial countryside have provided formal, practical, and poetic inspiration for both design and construction practices over a period of sixty years and through a succession of political regimes. Exploring this remarkable continuity, Sabatino rejects the division of Italian architectural history into sharply delineated periods such as fascist interwar and democratic postwar, and instead emphasizes the long, gradual process that integrated pastoral and urban ideals into a new, modernist Italy.

Modernist Architecture and the Vernacular Tradition in Italy

Pride in Modesty

Pride in Modesty argues that ordinary, often anonymous, everyday things inspired and transformed Italian art and architecture from the 1920s through the 1970s.

Luigi Ballerini

George Mott

Boasting to everyone that his forum would be grander than the Coliseum, Mussolini created the Stadio dei Marmi, or Stadium of Statues, an arena built outside Rome for the 1944 Olympic Games that were postponed by World War II. In FORO ITALICO, for the first time, photographs of the arena's statues are being shown collectively, exquisitely reproduced in a remarkable, deluxe, slip-cased edition which includes an introduction by Giorgio Armani, himself a connoisseur of 1930s art and architecture.

Foro Italico

Jean-Francois Lejeune

Bringing to light the debt twentieth-century modernist architects owe to the vernacular building traditions of the Mediterranean region, this book considers architectural practice and discourse from the 1920s to the 1980s. The essays here situate Mediterranean modernism in relation to concepts such as regionalism, nationalism, internationalism, critical regionalism, and postmodernism - an alternative history of the modern architecture and urbanism of a critical period in the twentieth century.

Michelangelo Sabatino

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