SERT. ARQUITECTO EN NUEVA YORK
Xavier Costa, Guido Hartray, et al.
[José Luís Sert] Xavier Costa, Guido Hartray, et al: SERT. ARQUITECTO EN NUEVA YORK. Barcelona: Museu d'Art Contemporani De Barcelona, 1997. First edition. parallel text in English and Spanish. Quarto. Photo illustrated matte French folded wrappers. 168 pp. Exhibition catalog with illustrated essays and black and white and some color reproductions. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Wrappers lightly rubbed, but a nearly fine copy.
8.5 x 10.5-inch softcover book with 176 pages of essays illustrated in both color and black and white, published as a catalog to accompany the exhibion at the Museu d'Art Contemporani De Barcelona, in April 1997.
José Luís Sert (1902 – 1983) played a leading role in defining urban design education and practice. He created the first professional degree program in urban design at Harvard in 1959 and shaped the profession through projects in the Boston area and beyond. He received a degree in architecture in 1929 from the Escuela Superior de Arquitectura in his native Barcelona. In the subsequent decade, he was among the leading young Spanish architects, active in both CIAM (International Congress for Modern Architecture) and GATEPAC (Grupo de Arquitectos y Técnicos Españoles para el Progreso de la Arquitectura Contemporánea). Sert gained an international reputation with his design for the Spanish Pavilion built for the 1937 International Exposition in Paris. Immigrating to the United States in 1941, he was from 1941 to 1958 a founding partner in Town Planning Associates, a design firm specializing in both architectural and urban design projects, with a particular focus on Latin America.
In 1958 Sert opened, with Huson Jackson and Ronald Gourley, Sert, Jackson & Gourley in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the firm's work included private residences, museums, and numerous large-scale commercial and educational commissions in the United States and abroad. The firm produced several buildings for Harvard University, including the Science Center, Holyoke Center, and Peabody Terrace. Sert served as Dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Design from 1953 until 1969. During his extraordinarily vibrant and productive tenure, he oversaw a variety of innovations in the curriculum, including the establishment of the first formal professional degree program in Urban Design.
"During the 1950s and 60s, urban design came to represent the physical shaping of cities through localized interventions rather than sweeping master proposals, and was increasingly characterized by the collaboration of professionals from a range of design backgrounds, and the arts," says Mary Daniels, Librarian, Special Collections, Harvard Design School. "Sert was instrumental in bringing together architects, landscape architects, and planners to engage in the formation of the city. Through his teaching and practice, he fostered the integration of the design disciplines at all scales of the urban framework, and the creation of new 'hearts of the city' that would become unique centers of collective vitality."