Synopses & Reviews
Hal Foster, author of the acclaimed Design and Crime, argues that a fusion of architecture and art is a defining feature of contemporary culture. While architects such as Zaha Hadid and Herzog and de Meuron draw on art to reanimate design, architecture has inspired fundamental transformations in painting, sculpture and film, which are also explored here. The book includes an extensive conversation with Richard Serra.
At the same time Foster points to a "global style" of architecture, as practiced by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, that is analogous to the "international style" of Le Corbusier, Gropius and Mies--a global style that, more than any art, conveys the look of modernity today, both its dreams and its delusions. In these ways Foster demonstrates that "the art-architecture complex" is a key indicator of broader social and economic trajectories and in urgent need of analysis and debate.
Review
"A timely tome with an urgent message for anyone on the art or architecture axis." Time Out
Review
"A worldview expansive enough to see dominant tendencies in contemporary architecture and (fairly) recent art as flipsides of the same coin, and both as reflective of the contemporary political order. This, then, is criticism with vaulting ambitions." Art Review
Review
"As an architecture writer reading Foster, who comes from the direction of art theory, I find it refreshing to encounter a degree of intellectual rigour you don't find too often on my side of the fence." Rowan Moore
Review
"Brimming with ideas and analysis...forceful, informed opinions." The Observer
Synopsis
A leading art theorist analyzes the global style in art and architecture.
Synopsis
Hal Foster is Townsend Martin Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. A coeditor of October magazine and a number of books, he is the editor of The Anti-Aesthetic as well as the author of Design and Crime, Recording, The Return of the Real, and Compulsive Beauty.
Synopsis
Hal Foster, author of the acclaimed
Design and Crime, argues that a fusion of architecture and art is a defining feature of contemporary culture. He identifies a “global style” of architecture—as practiced by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano—analogous to the international style of Le Corbusier, Gropius and Mies.
More than any art, today’s global style conveys both the dreams and delusions of modernity. Foster demonstrates that a study of the “art-architecture complex” provides invaluable insight into broader social and economic trajectories in urgent need of analysis.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
About the Author
SG