ARCHITECTURE YOU AND ME
S[igfried]. Giedion
S[igfried]. Giedion: ARCHITECTURE YOU AND ME [The Diary of a Development]. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958. First edition. Quarto. Blue cloth titled in back. Printed dust jacket. 221 pp. 70 black and white photographs. 13 text illustrations. Dust jacket designed by György Kepes. Robert E. Alexander’s copy with his signature on front free endpaper. Jacket lightly shelfworn and chipped to extremities. Front jacket flap oddly trimmed [?]. A nearly fine copy in a very good dust jacket.
5.75 x 8.5 hardcover book with 221 pages illustrated with 70 black and white photographs and 13 text illustrations. Dust jacket designed by György Kepes. Nice Association copy with Architect Robert E. Alexander’s signature.
Includes work by Georges Seurat, Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, Antoine Pevsner, Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, Georges Braque, Piet Mondrian, Robert Maillart, Theo Van Doesburg, Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer, Richard Neutra, Kenzo Tange, Frank Lloyd Wright, J. L. Sert & P. L. Wiener, André Studer, J. B. Bakema & Group OPBOUW, Walter Gropius, Pier Luigi Nervi, Naum Gabo, Eduardo F. Catalano, Hugh Stubbins, Jörn Utzon, and others.
Sigfried Giedion (Bohemia, 1888 – 1968) was a Swiss historian and critic of architecture. His ideas and books, Space, Time and Architecture, and Mechanization Takes Command, had an important conceptual influence on the members of the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in the 1950s era.
He was the first secretary-general of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne [CIAM]. He has also taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. He was a cool dude and knew everybody.
György Kepes (Hungary, 1906 - 2001) was a friend and collaborator of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Also of Hungarian descent, Kepes worked with Moholy first in Berlin and then in London before emigrating to the US in 1937. He was educated at the Budapest Royal Academy of Fine Arts. In his early career he gave up painting for filmmaking. This he felt was a better medium for artistically expressing his social beliefs. From 1930 to 1937 he worked off and on with Moholy-Nagy and through him, first in Berlin and then in London, met Walter Gropius and the science writer J. J. Crowther. In 1937, he was invited by Moholy to run the Color and Light Department at the New Bauhaus and later at the Institute of Design in Chicago. He taught there until 1943. In 1944 he wrote his landmark book LANGUAGE OF VISION. This text was influential in articulating the Bauhaus principles as well as the Gestalt theories. He taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1946 to 1974 and in 1967 he established the Center for Advanced Studies. During his career he also designed for the Container Corporation of America and Fortune magazine as well as Atlantic Monthly and Little, Brown.
Robert E. Alexander earned his B.A. in Architecture from Cornell University in 1930. Following his graduation, Alexander studied at Académie Beaux Kinds in Paris, as well as in Italy and Spain. Between 1936-42 Alexander had several stints with different architecture firms, when in 1942 he became assistant of the Lockhead Aircraft Corporation inBurbank (through 1946). Between 1946-49 Alexander practiced as an independent architect - after which (1949-58) he worked as a partner to Richard J. Neutra in the firm of Neutra and Alexander. In 1959, the accomplished architect founded Robert E. Alexander & Associates.
Beyond his B.A., Alexander continued academic work at University of California, Los Angeles (1952), and in 1953 served as Visiting Critic at Cornell University.
Alexander would win a great number of awards, certificates and accomodations such as: Honorable Award of the AIA for Baldwin Hills Village, Los Angeles (1946); 1951 Honorable Award for University of California Elementary School, Los Angeles; 1954 Special designer Award for town redevelopment study for Sacramento/California; Honorable Award of the AIA for Current Work, together with Richard J. Neutra; 1957 Honorable Award for Miramar chapel; as well as the Merit Award for University of California, US-Department House as well as development project for Los Angeles (1964).— Modern San Diego