Papadakis

In the exclusionary world of high modern architecture, it is curious to discover that two icons of the movement both admired the work of Sir Edwin Lutyens — an architect who had little or no interest in modernism. Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright created buildings that are very different, and the two men did not even like each other, but they shared a fascination for Lutyens' distinctively non-international style architecture. This polemical text is an account of why this occured. By exposing common aesthetic and structural themes in the architecture of these three giants, including the cities of New Delhi and Chandigahr, in India, the author explains why Wright and Le Corbusier may have had more in common with Lutyens than with many of their modern peers. The primary text in the book was written in 1967 and was published in a student journal in the U.S. with a small circulation. It has remained an underground classic since then — perhaps because its contents are so disruptive of our current views of 20th century modernism.

Human shapes rendered in varying degrees of physiognomic and anatomical verisimilitude, all deeply imagined and felt. Figures is the first volume of a comprehensive series on the artistic work of the well-known international architect and town planner Rob Krier. Although best known for his city planning projects all over Europe, especially the new town of Brandevoort near Helmond, and a new village near Hertogenbosch, both in the Netherlands; for his teaching as a Professor at the Technical University of Vienna and as a visiting professor at Yale, Rob Krier's first love has always been art and sculpture, where he can create freely without the constraints of clients, budgets and building regulations. His many sculptures for public spaces include figures for the main buildings of his Ritterstrasse and Rauchstrasse developments in Berlin, and for the Mol de la Fusta in Barcelona. He has spoken of his figures as the 'dreams with which I fill my evenings.' The drawings reproduced here were made in the postcard size notebooks he always carries with him. The figures themselves are also small, formed in clay on a modelling block, then glazed and fired in his kiln, the work of an artist, independent of any constraints.