Product Description

This highly regarded, consistently well-selling and extremely well-written book brings to life architectural history and its canon of great buildings through a lively approach that is both insightful and accurate. This story of architecture moves back and forth between long views of historical trends and close-ups of major works and crucial architectural themes. The authors have successfully made the subject of architectural history - which due to its technical aspects can too often be off-putting to the lay reader - transparent, engaging, and easily mastered. All buildings are illustrated with effective images that are well reproduced and thoughtfully keyed to the text. In the second edition, the content of the book has been fine-tuned and polished. Sections in the Renaissance, Baroque, and Modern chapters were reworked to include recent scholarship and, in the case of the Baroque, expand coverage to Eastern Europe. The Introduction has been significantly updated in its slant and language, including a discussion of the newly introduced term "Postmodernity." The most significant and exciting change, however, is the addition of the new chapter, which covers architectural developments from approximately 1980 to 2000. The new chapter is a challenging yet comprehensible take on the exciting, diverse, and stunning buildings from the last twenty years. Most impressively, the author creates a cohesive story from these recent buildings that are, by their very nature, extremely complex, individualistic, and difficult to categorise.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1801344 in Books
• Published on: 2002-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 624 pages

About the Author

Marvin Trachtenberg is Edith Kitzmiller Professor of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where he has taught since 1962 He studied at Yale University and the Institute of Fine Arts. A renowned scholar of architectural history, Professor Trachtenberg has contributed a long and distinguished list of publications to the field. Of special mention is his book The Campanile of Florence Cathedral, "Giotto's Tower" (1972), which was awarded The Alice Davis Hitchcock Prize by the Society of Architectural Historians for the outstanding architectural book by an American scholar for 1972-73. More recently, his book Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art, and Power in Early Modern Florence (1997) was awarded two prizes: The Charles Rufus Morey Award from the College Art Association and, again, The Alice Davis Hitchcock Prize. His book The Statue of Liberty in the "Art in Context" series was published in 1976. Professor Trachtenberg has also been the recipient of numerous fellowships: the National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellowship for study in Italy, 1974-75; Fellowship at the Villa I Tatti (The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies) in Florence, 1974-76; the Guggenheim Fellowship, 198586; and most recently, the Graham Foundation Fellowship, 2000-2001. An architectural photographer of note, many of his photographs are found in this book and other publications. He is currently working on two books: one on the authorship of the Pazzi Chapel and another on the relationship of architecture and time.

Isabelle Hyman is Professor of Fine Arts at New York University, College ofArts and Science. She received a B.A. from Vassar College, an M.A. from Columbia University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Professor Hyman is a specialist in the art and architecture of the Renaissance, in the history of architecture, and in the architecture of Marcel Breuer. She is the author of Marcel Breuer, Architect: The Career and the Buildings (2001) and of Fifteenth Century Florentine Studies: The Palazzo Medici and the Church of San Lorenzo (1977); she was editor of Brunelleschi in Perspective in "The Artist in Perspective" series (1974) and has published numerous articles and reviews in scholarly journals. In 1972 73 she was Senior Kress Fellow at Villa I Tatti (The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies) in Florence. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (1988) and a fellowship from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts (1988). In 1991 she was Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor at Williams College. Professor Hyman has served on the Board of Directors of the Society of Architectural Historians, on the Board of Directors of the College Art Association, and was editor of the College Art Association's scholarly monograph series. She is currently at work on studies of late-fifteenth-century Florentine architecture.