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This book explores the evolving concept of unfinishedness as essential to understanding art movements from the Renaissance to the present day. Unfinished features more than 200 works, created in a variety of media, by artists ranging from Leonardo, Titian, Rembrandt, Turner, and Cézanne to Picasso, Warhol, Twombly, Freud, Richter, and Nauman. What unites these works,(...)
May 2016
Unfinished: thoughts left visible
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This book explores the evolving concept of unfinishedness as essential to understanding art movements from the Renaissance to the present day. Unfinished features more than 200 works, created in a variety of media, by artists ranging from Leonardo, Titian, Rembrandt, Turner, and Cézanne to Picasso, Warhol, Twombly, Freud, Richter, and Nauman. What unites these works, across centuries and media, is that each one displays some aspect of being unfinished. Essays and case studies by major contemporary scholars address this key concept from the perspective of both the creator and the viewer, probing the impact that this long artistic trajectory—which can be traced back to the first century—has had on modern and contemporary art. The book explores the degrees to which instances of incompleteness were accidental or intentional, experimental or conceptual. Also included are illuminating interviews with contemporary artists, including Tuymans, Celmins, and Marden, and parallel considerations of the unfinished in literature and film. The result is a multidisciplinary approach and thought-provoking analysis that provide valuable insight into the making, meaning, and critical reception of the unfinished in art.
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To concentrate only on the profession of architecture is to ignore the much larger field of architecture, which structures the entire social universe of the architect and of which architects are only one part. This book critically surveys that field, exposing(...)
The favored circle : the social foundations of architectural distinction
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To concentrate only on the profession of architecture is to ignore the much larger field of architecture, which structures the entire social universe of the architect and of which architects are only one part. This book critically surveys that field, exposing many myths and debunking a number of heroes in the process. Using the conceptual apparatus of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Stevens describes the field of architecture on two levels. First, he provides a detailed account of the field as it is at any given point in time, describing the different components and their relationships. Second, he analyzes the dynamics of the field through time, from the Renaissance to the present. He discusses the system of architectural education, as well as everyday aspects such as the competition for reputation. He concludes that throughout history, the most eminent architects have been connected to each other by master-pupil and collegiate relations. These networks, which still exist, provide a mechanism for architectural influence that runs parallel to that of the university-based schools.
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November 1998, Cambridge, Mass.
Architectural Theory
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''Amaza Lee Meredith imagines herself modern'' tells the captivating story of Amaza Lee Meredith, a Black woman architect, artist, and educator born into the Jim Crow South, whose bold choices in both life and architecture expand our understanding of the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance, while revealing the importance of architecture as a force in Black(...)
Amaza Lee Meredith imagines herself modern: Architecture and the Black Amercian middle class
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''Amaza Lee Meredith imagines herself modern'' tells the captivating story of Amaza Lee Meredith, a Black woman architect, artist, and educator born into the Jim Crow South, whose bold choices in both life and architecture expand our understanding of the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance, while revealing the importance of architecture as a force in Black middle-class identity. Through her charismatic protagonist, Jacqueline Taylor derives new insights into the experiences of Black women at the forefront of culture in early twentieth-century America, caught between expectation and ambition, responsibility and desire. Central to Taylor’s argument is that Meredith’s response to modern architecture and art, like those of other Black cultural producers, was not marginal to the modernist project; instead, her work reveals the tensions and inconsistencies in how American modernism has been defined. In this way, the book shines a necessary light on modernism’s complexity, while overturning perceived notions of race and gender in relation to the modernist project and challenging the notion of the white male hero of modern architecture.
Architectural Theory
Rewriting Alberti
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Much has been written about Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti’s mantra of part-to-whole as one of the continuing conditions of architecture. While this underlying thesis has often been repeated in the annals of architectural history and theory, architects have rarely questioned the idea. In ''Rewriting Alberti'', architect Peter Eisenman suggests, however, that(...)
Architectural Theory
October 2025
Rewriting Alberti
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Much has been written about Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti’s mantra of part-to-whole as one of the continuing conditions of architecture. While this underlying thesis has often been repeated in the annals of architectural history and theory, architects have rarely questioned the idea. In ''Rewriting Alberti'', architect Peter Eisenman suggests, however, that Alberti provoked a radical discourse beyond the part-to-whole dialogue featured in his Ten Books of Architecture. Eisenman’s in-depth analysis of Alberti’s five built works reveals a disjunction between the architect’s buildings and theoretical writings, suggesting a new relationship of form to meaning based on the fragmentation of homogeneous space. ''Rewriting Alberti'' includes contributions by Pier Vittorio Aureli, Mario Carpo, and Daniel Sherer. Carpo, an architectural historian and critic, theorizes that Alberti’s work initiated an idea of the discipline as a notational system akin to contemporary computational logics. By way of comparison, Sherer, an architectural historian, reconsiders critic Manfredo Tafuri’s readings of Alberti, and architect and theorist Aureli draws on Alberti to propose another idea of the architectural “project.”
Architectural Theory
Toward an architecture
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Published in 1923, Toward an Architecture had an immediate impact on architects throughout Europe and remains a foundational text for students and professionals. Le Corbusier urges readers to cease thinking of architecture as a matter of historical styles and instead open their eyes to the modern world. Simultaneously a historian, critic, and prophet, he provocatively(...)
Toward an architecture
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Published in 1923, Toward an Architecture had an immediate impact on architects throughout Europe and remains a foundational text for students and professionals. Le Corbusier urges readers to cease thinking of architecture as a matter of historical styles and instead open their eyes to the modern world. Simultaneously a historian, critic, and prophet, he provocatively juxtaposes views of classical Greece and Renaissance Rome with images of airplanes, cars, and ocean liners. Le Corbusier's slogans�such as "the house is a machine for living in"�and philosophy changed how his contemporaries saw the relationship between architecture, technology, and history. This edition includes a new translation of the original text, a scholarly introduction, and background notes that illuminate the text and illustrations. Jean-Louis Cohen is the Sheldon H. Solow Chair in the History of Architecture at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts. He has written extensively on Le Corbusier's work. John Goodman is a translator and art historian. He has rendered some thirty books from French into English.
Architecture Monographs
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In 1452, Florentine sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti unveiled a masterpiece that had been a quarter-century in the making: ten bronze panels depicting intricate scenes from the Old Testament. The monumental gilded bronze doors (each more than 15 feet tall) were designed for the Baptistery in the Piazza del Duomo in Florence. Centuries of admirers have considered “The Gates of(...)
The gates of paradise : Lorenzo Ghiberti's masterpiece
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In 1452, Florentine sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti unveiled a masterpiece that had been a quarter-century in the making: ten bronze panels depicting intricate scenes from the Old Testament. The monumental gilded bronze doors (each more than 15 feet tall) were designed for the Baptistery in the Piazza del Duomo in Florence. Centuries of admirers have considered “The Gates of Paradise” one of the great masterworks of Western art. This extensively illustrated book displays the full glory and elaborate details of many of the newly restored bronze panels, the extraordinary work of the conservators and restorers who cleaned the priceless doors. In a series of fascinating chapters, expert contributors capture Ghiberti’s world, his remarkable talent at representing human emotion in rich illusionistic settings, the relationships between Renaissance patrons and artists, and the collaborations and rivalries among artists. Other chapters explore the challenging craft of bronze sculpture, Ghiberti’s casting and finishing techniques, and the painstaking process involved in documenting and restoring the treasured doors. A chronology of Ghiberti’s life completes this lavishly produced volume.
History until 1900, Italy
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Published to mark the 800th anniversary in 2007 of the founding of modern Liverpool by King John, Liverpool 800 is the definitive biography of this magnificent world city. Contributors explore the life of Liverpool over eight centuries, looking at the town’s early development, the eighteenth-century foundations of its mercantile economy, the golden period of the(...)
Architecture since 1900, Europe
September 2006, Liverpool
Liverpool 800 : culture, character & history
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Published to mark the 800th anniversary in 2007 of the founding of modern Liverpool by King John, Liverpool 800 is the definitive biography of this magnificent world city. Contributors explore the life of Liverpool over eight centuries, looking at the town’s early development, the eighteenth-century foundations of its mercantile economy, the golden period of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the difficult inter-war years, the fifties boom and the subsequent disastrous and seemingly irreversible decline – seemingly, because the winning of European Capital of Culture status for 2008 reflects Liverpool’s contemporary renaissance, an aspect of current history which is also reflected upon by the contributors. Ranging widely over politics and government, famous and infamous personalities, domestic lives and global connections, and culture both high and low, "Liverpool 800" offers a warts and all portrait of a city which has inspired contempt (‘a black spot on the Mersey’) and adulation (‘the centre of consciousness of the human universe’) but rarely indifference. This publication includes over 300 illustrations, many of which have never been published before.
Architecture since 1900, Europe
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Ce livre raconte l’exploration d’une terre inconnue, la nôtre. À la suite des voyageurs de la Renaissance partis cartographier les terra incognita du Nouveau Monde, « Terra Forma » propose, cinq siècles plus tard, de découvrir une autre Terre, ou plutôt de redécouvrir autrement celle que nous croyons si bien connaître en partant du constat que si les transformations(...)
Terra forma : manuel de cartographies potentielles
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Ce livre raconte l’exploration d’une terre inconnue, la nôtre. À la suite des voyageurs de la Renaissance partis cartographier les terra incognita du Nouveau Monde, « Terra Forma » propose, cinq siècles plus tard, de découvrir une autre Terre, ou plutôt de redécouvrir autrement celle que nous croyons si bien connaître en partant du constat que si les transformations récentes des conditions d’habitabilité du monde sont si difficiles à percevoir, c’est parce que les représentations disponibles sont trop abstraites, lointaines, et dans une certaine mesure trop stables. En proposant une extension du vocabulaire cartographique, ce livre est un manifeste pour l’imagination géographique, et, ce faisant, politique. Si certains des phénomènes auxquels nous assistons (érosion des sols, épuisement des ressources, accélération des espaces-temps urbains, intensification des zones polluées) nous échappent par leur échelle, leur durée, leur ampleur, c’est par le développement de nos techniques de représentation que l’on peut espérer mieux les comprendre. En mettant en « cartes » certaines propositions des sciences du Système-Terre et de la pensée écologique contemporaine, « Terra Forma » permet de mieux saisir leur portée politique.
Architectural Plans and Cartography
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Visiting the villas of Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio (1508-80), one inevitably asks oneself how people actually occupied them. Palladio conceived his villas as ''small towns'' (piccole città) that formed a single unit with adjacent service buildings and farm fields. Within their walls lived people of all ages, social backgrounds and skills. These buildings were(...)
Living with Palladio in the sixteenth century
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Visiting the villas of Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio (1508-80), one inevitably asks oneself how people actually occupied them. Palladio conceived his villas as ''small towns'' (piccole città) that formed a single unit with adjacent service buildings and farm fields. Within their walls lived people of all ages, social backgrounds and skills. These buildings were the venue for significant moments of public life, and the principles of hygiene, privacy and comfort, which we consider so defining and essential today, did not apply- in a sense furniture as such did not exist. ''Living with Palladio in the sixteenth century'' investigates how Palladio’s houses, their floors, rooms and measurements, were designed to structure the life of such a heterogeneous family of people. It analyses their hierarchical structure with the owner (padrone) at the top and everyone involved in the everyday running of the household (famiglia minuta) at the bottom. This book fills a decisive gap in research literature on the famous Italian architect by looking at how Palladio prioritized the domestic functions of his private buildings.
Architecture Monographs
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This book is split into six chapters that proceed more or less chronologically. It begins by exploring the origins of the museum both as a cultural phenomenon and as a particular type of space. Central to this, as the first chapter explores, was the ‘princely collection’, that is, collections of painting and sculpture assembled by royalty and the nobility across Europe(...)
The Museum : from its origins to the 21st century
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This book is split into six chapters that proceed more or less chronologically. It begins by exploring the origins of the museum both as a cultural phenomenon and as a particular type of space. Central to this, as the first chapter explores, was the ‘princely collection’, that is, collections of painting and sculpture assembled by royalty and the nobility across Europe that began during the Renaissance and continued during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although varying both in extent and artistic focus, the motivations driving the establishing of these early collections generally derived from their creators’ desires to fashion learned and enlightened images of themselves and their courts. With some exceptions, admission to these collections was limited to the social elite and those that they were trying to impress. The idea that collections should be open to a wider social group began to emerge during the eighteenth century with the advent of the wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities. These contained not just works of art, but all manner of objects, from natural history specimens to religious or cult artefacts, and everything in between.
Museums and Universal Exhibitions