Picasso Barcelona: A Cartography

Arts & Photography

Rafart, Claustre

History & Criticism

Tenov Books

Earth Matter: An Index on Extractivism

Science & Math

Purbrick, Louise

Ribas, Xavier

Acosta, Ignacio

Nature & Ecology

A thoroughly unconventional monograph on the work of contemporary architect Enric Miralles, this book by acclaimed artist David Bestué combines the forms of essay, diary, notebook, and more to create a book that is simultaneously an analysis of artistic work and a work of art itself. Asking what “spending time” in and around the works of Miralles means, Bestué coaxes unlikely meanings and emotions from them, capturing the buildings and spaces in a series of photographs that illustrate a living architecture, removed from the preciousness to which architecture can so frequently succumb. Applying the mind of an artist to the work of another creator, Bestué tries to unravel Miralles’s creative process, to understand how his ideas were formed, refined, and made into physical objects that survive and thrive in a seemingly unsympathetic world.

Enric Miralles from Left to Right (and without Glasses)

Bestué, David

Architecture

This beautifully illustrated book, the catalog for an exhibition on view at the National Museum of Art of Catalonia in Barcelona and coorganized with the Picasso Museum in Paris, explores important affinities between Picasso and Romanesque art. Using two key moments as starting points, Juan José Lahuerta and Emilia Philippot first discuss the summer of 1906, when Picasso stayed in the village of Gòsol in the Catalan Pyrenees, and then turn to 1934, as he visited the Romanesque art collections of what is today the National Museum of Art of Catalonia. Picasso’s discovery of the Romanesque nurtured his interest in other “primitive” or ethnographic art, later echoed in such decisive works as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Importantly, while Lahuerta and Philippot avoid any attempt to trace direct Romanesque influences on Picasso—as they note, his work consistently escapes such linear accounts—they do demonstrate that Picasso’s interest in the twelfth-century sculpture Virgin from Gósol, his lifelong fascination with the theme of the crucifixion, and his study of the skull all reflect elements that were also of major importance in Romanesque art and architecture. What these shared features allow, Lahuerta and Philippot ultimately argue, is not only a richer understanding of Picasso’s work, but also a rediscovering and reinvention of Romanesque art in our contemporary moment, causing the medieval to become refreshingly and paradoxically modern.

Romanesque - Picasso

Lahuerta, Juan José

Philippot, Emilia

Co-opting the discredited format of the history textbook with its didactic tone, well-defined stages, and linear development, David Bestué subverts the clichés of historiography, creating an unorthodox path whilst recovering forgotten ideas and breathing new life into familiar tropes. It is a work that seeks to understand how the landscape is drawn around us. A fresh and very personal reading of our recent history, illuminated by photographs, collages, and gadgets created to explain the reasons of form. Formalismo Puro is an art project in its own right, created by a conceptual artist with a background in sculpture, enthralled by the notion of architecture as form.

Formalismo Puro: Un repaso a la arquitectura moderna y contemporánea de España

Published in 1922 in Russian, Aleksei Gan’s Constructivism was the first theoretical treatise of postrevolutionary Russia’s emergent Constructivist movement. Fired with revolutionary zeal, it was unquestionably a declaration of war on traditional bourgeois art. Constructivism recasts artists and architects as Constructors, turning away from aesthetic or speculative problems in art and instead focusing on the fusion of art with everyday life in order to create a functional system of design, one in keeping with the great task of building the new communist society. This edition replicates Gan’s original layout, which was one of the first experiments in Constructivist typography and graphic design, and it also presents a substantial introductory essay by art historian Christina Lodder that examines Gan’s own odd, mercurial character and the tracks he left across avant-garde Russian graphics, architecture, film, and theater. Nearly a century later, Constructivism remains a powerful manifesto, and this new translation will help scholars trace its enduring influence on twentieth-century art and design.

Constructivism

Gan, Aleksei

Published in 1922 in Russian, Aleksei Gan’s Constructivism was the first theoretical treatise of postrevolutionary Russia’s emergent Constructivist movement. Fired with revolutionary zeal, it was unquestionably a declaration of war on traditional bourgeois art. Constructivism recasts artists and architects as Constructors, turning away from aesthetic or speculative problems in art and instead focusing on the fusion of art with everyday life in order to create a functional system of design, one in keeping with the great task of building the new communist society. This edition replicates Gan’s original layout, which was one of the first experiments in Constructivist typography and graphic design, and it also presents a substantial introductory essay by art historian Christina Lodder that examines Gan’s own odd, mercurial character and the tracks he left across avant-garde Russian graphics, architecture, film, and theater. Nearly a century later, Constructivism remains a powerful manifesto, and this new translation will help scholars trace its enduring influence on twentieth-century art and design.

EL CONSTRUCTIVISMO

Columns of Smoke is a four-volume collection. The first volume includes “Photography or Life” and “Popular Mies,” which illuminate overlooked aspects of modern architecture and photography and reveal a more nuanced—and plausible—conception of the modern world. In “Photography or Life,” Juan José Lahuerta contrasts well-known images tied to the history of twentieth-century architecture with anonymous graphic materials and pictures from the popular press. In doing so, he demonstrates that pointing a camera at a building is neither natural nor innocent—it involves deliberate and telling decisions. His analysis of the work of Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, for example, suggests irreconcilable differences between the two architects that represent radically opposed approaches to architecture and life. Furthermore, a close study of snapshots of Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus building taken by teachers and students leads to new ways of understanding the myths associated with the Dessau school. Using the same method in “Popular Mies,” Lahuerta looks at photographs of architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s work and shows that Mies was influenced not only by Stieglitz and Camera Work, but also a mass culture that enjoyed zeppelins, music halls, x-rays, and phantasmagorical gadgets. At the same time, in their portrayals of Mies’s work, the press and anonymous photographers situated it in a popular context that stands as a counterpoint to the notion of a heroic modern era. This first volume of Columns of Smoke is a brilliant treatment of modern visual culture that will redefine our concept of modernity.

Photography or Life / Popular Mies: Columns of Smoke, Volume 1

In his Columns of Smoke series, Juan José Lahuerta takes on the enormously ambitious task of re-reading modernity, offering us fresh ways of looking at it while drawing new links between the ideas of architecture and ornamentation, with a special focus on how they have been treated in print. While the first volume of Columns of Smoke considered epoch-making architect Adolf Loos’s relationship with photography, here Lahuerta turns to the Classical strand in Loos’s architecture and to his written work—and specifically his engagement with architectural and artistic theory. Lahuerta pays particular attention to Loos’s seminal “Ornament and Crime,” the essay that established disornamentation as the signal feature of twentieth-century architecture. Through close analysis of that essay he unearths the racially charged, pseudoscientific ideas from early anthropology that underpin Loos’s thinking. Sure to be controversial, this new reading of Loos’s landmark writings calls the whole disornamentation project into question, and in the process, it reveals a radically new perspective on a major turn in modern design and culture.

On Loos, Ornament and Crime: Columns of Smoke: Volume II

Juan José Lahuerta’s Columns of Smoke series offers bold new readings of modernity and its key figures while redefining the connections between architecture, ornamentation, and the portrayal of both in print media. The third volume focuses on the Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926), whose spectacular fin-de-siècle bohemian modernism stood in revolutionary contrast to the leading approaches of the day. With the rise of Le Corbusier’s modern style of architecture in the early twentieth century, architects who favored ornamentation and a strong bond with nature, like Gaudí, were relegated to the sidelines. Lahuerta draws on first-hand documents, many previously unpublished, to show that Gaudí, far from being the isolated eccentric seen in other accounts, was keenly aware of the major theories and works of his time and cleverly used industrial processes to produce ornamental details that appear today to be almost handmade. Equally impressive was Gaudí’s ability to capitalize on his fame once in the public eye, as both the architect and his buildings appeared in illustrations in the popular press. His influence on avant-garde artists like Salvador Dalí, who admired the edible appearance of Gaudí’s Casa Milà in Barcelona, and Pablo Picasso, who was fascinated by the eroticism of the Casa Batlló, attests to the architect’s impact far beyond his field. Richly illustrated with rare images from a variety of sources, this highly visual take on Gaudí is also a spirited commentary on the roots of modernism more generally. Entertaining and perceptive, Antoni Gaudí challenges us to reconsider what we thought we knew about this pioneering architect and his distinctive work.

Antoni Gaudí: Ornament, Fire and Ashes (Volume 3) (Columns of Smoke)

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