The title of Richard Rezac’s Renaissance Society exhibition, Address, plays on the multivalent quality of the word. As a noun, it refers to a unique identifier of a precise location. As a verb, it refers to a form of communication crafted for a specific people, time, and place. This exhibition drew upon both elements of the word’s two meanings: the artist deliberately created and selected works in response to the architecture of the Renaissance Society’s gallery space, and the title also nods to the sculptures’ relationship to their presumptive audience.
This book showcases twenty pieces featured in the exhibition that are made of a wide range of materials including cherry wood, cast bronze, and aluminum and that span Rezac’s career—including newly commissioned pieces.s Through the concept of address, the exhibit and book explore the artist’s ongoing engagement with both tangible, mathematical ordering systems and the elusive mechanisms of memory and interpretation. This publication continues Rezac’s address, extending it to a greater audience of readers through a generous selection of images, a conversation between the artist and curator Solveig Øvstebø, and new texts by Matthew Goulish, Jennifer R. Gross, and James Rondeau.

Dianna Frid's sculptures, installations, artist's books, and mixed media work explore the intersection of text and textile, matter and subject matter. Richard Rezac has created thought-provoking abstract object-sculptures since the 1980s. This book, the catalog for a recent exhibition at the DePaul Art Museum, brings together works by both of these Chicago-based artists. In doing so, Dianna Frid + Richard Rezac: Split Complementary shines a light on their shared sensibilities--a rigorous yet poetic approach that revels in the nuances of color, surface, and material. Frid's and Rezac's works appear here accompanied by rare books from DePaul University's John T. Richardson Library and a variety of objects from the DePaul Art Museum's permanent collection. The juxtaposition of objects made by artists, craftspeople, and bookbinders generates affinities that broaden how we see and understand all of the work assembled in these pages. Complementing each other formally, these pieces offer opportunities to find familiar patterns in unfamiliar forms and surprising connections between dissimilar objects.   

When you think of modern architecture, you think of Chicago, the birthplace of the skyscraper, the cradle of twentieth-century American design, and the home of enduring works by such iconic figures as Louis Sullivan, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Idealized through tourism and celebrated in the groves of academe, the city's majestic skyline and landmark buildings remain a living testament to the modern movement. In Chicago Architecture, Charles Waldheim and Katerina Ruedi Ray revise and offer alternatives to the archetypal story of modern architecture in Chicago. They and an esteemed group of contributors assert that the mythic status of Chicago architecture has distorted our understanding of the historical circumstances in which it was realized. This searching volume illuminates the importance of photographs, books, magazines, and other media in the cultivation of an international audience for Chicago architecture; it explores the pivotal role of real estate developers, finance and insurance sectors, and speculative capital markets in the development of the city itself; and, perhaps most notably, it examines a wide variety of overlooked architectural works and their creators--individuals who did not fit into the dominant modernist narrative. Offering new insights on Chicago public housing and O'Hare International Airport, on the Columbian Exposition and Marina City, on the city's grid system and the place of women architects in the story of Chicago modernism, and on the subjective experience of living inside Chicago's most well-known buildings, Chicago Architecture is a work of enormous scope and vision--a book as heady and towering as the skyline it considers.

On the eve of the twentieth century, Chicago was rapidly outgrowing its borders. Architect Louis Henry Sullivan (American, 1856–1924) answered the demand for more office space, theaters, department stores, and financial centers by pioneering what would become an essential model for city life-the skyscraper. Blending Art Nouveau complexity with geometric elegance, Sullivan's tall buildings included Chicago's Auditorium Building, the largest building in the world when it was completed in 1889. Sullivan's design was heralded as the Wonder of the Age-a title equally fitting for the architect himself.Louis Sullivan's designs stand today as leading exemplars of Chicago School architecture. Even Frank Lloyd Wright, a former assistant to Sullivan, would later refer to him as his "lieber Meister," or "beloved master." Sullivan brought to his practice a conviction that ornamentation should arise naturally from a building's overall design, restating, in a large or small way, themes expressed in the structure as a whole. Having spent much of his career in a late Victorian world that bristled with busy, fussy ornament for ornament's sake, Sullivan refuted the fashionable style with the now famous dictum "Form follows function." This break from tradition is perhaps most evident in Sullivan's strides to reimagine the commercial space-from America's earliest skyscrapers to the small-town banks that populated the architect's commissions in the second half of his career.In Louis Sullivan: Creating a New American Architecture, nearly two hundred photographs with descriptive captions document Sullivan's genius for modern design. Patrick Cannon introduces each chapter with key biographical information and discusses the influences that shaped Sullivan's illustrious career. Rare historical photographs chronicle those buildings that, sadly, have since been destroyed, while James Caulfield's contemporary photography captures Sullivan's existing Chicago buildings and many other structures in eastern and midwestern cities that are of equal importance in the architect's oeuvre.

This work introduces a new interpretation of the work of Borromini and of architecture in general in its analysis of the relation between architectural forms and philosophical structures, often literally translated in Borromini's work through philosophical diagrams and symbols circulating in 17th century Rome in texts by writers such as Nicolas Cusanus and Athanasius Kircher.

With over 200 stunning photographs, this Japanese design and architecture book showcases some of the most beautiful homes in Japan. The pure beauty of Japanese architecture and design has inspired many of the world's top architects and designers. The grace and elegance of the Japanese sensibility is reflected in both modern and traditional Japanese homes, from their fluid floor plans to their use of natural materials. InThe Japanese House, renowned Japanese photographer Noboru Murata has captured this Eastern spirit with hundreds of vivid color photographs of 15 Japanese homes. As we step behind the lens with Murata, we're witness to the unique Japanese aesthetic, to the simple proportions modeled after the square of the tatami mat; to refined, rustic decor; to earthy materials like wood, paper, straw, ceramics, and textiles. This is a glorious house-tour readers can return to again and again, for ideas, inspiration or simply admiration.

In this book of original interviews, sculptors describe their creative process--what they do and how they do it. Some of the 22 sculptors are internationally known while others have regional reputations; interviewees include Bruce Beasley, Lynda Benglis, John Henry and Dennis Oppenheim. Each artist has compelling things to say: personal goals, where ideas come from and how they're transformed into sculpture, material selection, color and scale determinations, works in progress, obstacles, and creative maturation.

Marburg, Germany, October 6, 1847. His father, the economist. Bruno Hildebrand, was forced b} the revolution of 1848 to seek inS witzerland freedom from political persecution. Having reached school age, the son attended the gymnasium of Bern, but did not show much enthusiasm for the abstract studies there offered to him. In 1861 his father was called to the University of Jena. The young man now showed such distinctive signs of artistic ability that he was sent by his father to Nuremberg, to take a course in the art school of that city. At the end of 1867 he left Germany for a prolonged stay in Italy. The influence of the masterpieces of art accumulated in that country proved to be infinitely more beneficial to his artistic development than the school instruction which he had practically out-grown when he entered the art school. In Rome Hildebrand became acquainted with Hans von Marees, whose independence of thought encouraged the younger artist to follow his own bent. After staying in Rome a year and a half Hildebrand returned to Germany and busied himself for some time with sculpture in Berlin. In 1872 he went again to Italy and for many years stayed The above biographic sketch is an abstract from the book by A. Heilmeyer: Adolf Hildebrand, Kunstler-Monographien No. 60, Velhagen Klasing, 1902; pp. 99, 75 cts. The book contains nearly a hundred reproductions of the artists own works.

The present book, then, which includes a complete catalogue of Brancusi''s sculpture, is another result of the Retrospective, boasting a precision of data unattainable before it had taken place a great number of new color photography by Robert Mates and Paul Katz, of the staff of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The text and the Biographical Outline here are largely those which I wrote for the Retrospective catalogue, now altered and enlarged to reflect Brancusi studies in the intervening years. The Catalogue in my monograph of 1968; the Bibliography lists the sources of the data in the Catalogue. It has been thought useful to include a Concordance of reproductions of the sculptures printed in ten extensive publications on the subject.

Auguste Rodin has been called the father of modern sculpture and on the centenary of his death this stunning book presents a fresh examination of his legacy. Exploring the full range of the work of French artist Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), this book also reveals the deep significance of Rodin’s oeuvre to the history of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, which holds one of the finest collections of Rodin sculpture in the United States. The publication contains examples from his early days as a struggling artist to his mature and most successful works, including The Age of Bronze (ca. 1875–1877), Saint John the Baptist Preaching (1878), The Burghers of Calais (1885–1886), and The Kiss (ca. 1884). The majority of the bronzes are lifetime casts by the sculptor, making this collection a rare and significant body of Rodin’s output. A related group of plaster models and fragments augment these major pieces, adding to the scope and breadth of this volume. Showcasing beautiful new photography of more than fifty of Rodin’s most iconic artworks alongside an illuminating essay, this book will delight and surprise readers with its novel insights into one of the greatest sculptors in art history.

Chicago is world famous for an architectural tradition that has influenced building around the globe. It is the birthplace of the skyscraper and the cradle of modern architecture; it gave rise to the urban office building as we know it, and to the flowing, open floor plans of today's homes. This book chronicles Chicago's architectural tradition from the nineteenth through the early twenty-first century, examining its evolution in the context of broader historical, social, technological, and artistic currents. It explores Chicago architects' quest for a quintessentially American style, and the century of innovation that pushed buildings ever higher, opened them to space and light, and increasingly dissolved the boundaries between indoors and out. It looks at world-renowned structures from the inside out, giving special attention to the interiors that were and remain so important to Chicago's architects. Chicago School commercial building, to the low-slung Prairie School house, the streamlined Art Deco skyscraper, and the minimalist Miesian tower of glass and steel, all the way through to the strikingly original, diverse designs of the present day's so-called second modern movement. This eminently readable text vividly discusses both the life and work of such towering figures as Daniel Burnham, John Wellborn Root, Louis H. Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Mies van der Rohe - as well as that of the many lesser-known architects who have made outstanding contributions.

In this book, John Shea has approached Shaker craftsmanship from the designer's point of view. He has filled the need for a careful analysis of Shaker design-not just for furniture but for smallcraft and utility designs as well. He has included many photographs of classic pieces, and to expose the anatomy of these pieces that are accurately measured drawings and illustrations of original joinery methods. Moreover, there are chapters on the history of the Shakers, and their woodworking industry, so that before the reader is exposed to specific examples of Shaker design, he will know enough of the Shakers' creed and customs to understand their works.