THE NEW ARCHITECTURE AND THE BAUHAUS
Walter Gropius
Walter Gropius: THE NEW ARCHITECTURE AND THE BAUHAUS. London/New York: Faber and Faber/the Museum of Modern Art, (n. d. 1936). First American edition. Octavo. Oatmeal cloth stamped in red. Photographically printed dust jacket. 80 pp. 16 black and white plates. Endpapers lightly offsetted. Price-clipped dust jacket worn at spine crown and heel and very slightly to edges. The rare first edition Dust jacket designed by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy carries the Faber and Faber imprint with Frank Pick's name [instead of Joseph Hudnutt] on front flap. A near fine copy in a very good or better dust jacket. The dust jacket features an example of Moholy-Nagy's "Rhodoid" technique: photographing a composition through glass or other transparent material to catch the shadow cast on the background. Very cool indeed. This book looks and feels like a true artifact of the age, properly English and suitably Avant-Garde.
5.75 x 8.25 book with 80 glossy pages, including 16 full-pages b/w photographs. This is the book where Gropius attempted to spell out his theories of the new architecture he had incubated and formalized while Director of the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau from 1919 to 1928. Quite uncommon in the first-issue state with the Dust Jacket.
Contents:
Born and educated in Germany, Walter Gropius (1883-1969) belongs to the select group of architects that massively influenced the international development of modern architecture. As the founding director of the Bauhaus, Gropius made inestimable contributions to his field, to the point that knowing his work is crucial to understanding Modernism. His early buildings, such Fagus Boot-Last Factory and the Bauhaus Building in Dessau, with their use of glass and industrial features, are still indispensable points of reference. After his emigration to the United States, he influenced the education of architects there and became, along with Mies van der Rohe, a leading proponent of the International Style.
Spreads from this volume can be viewed here.
out of stock