By Tamara Moscowitz
VandM’s summer spotlight on art and photography and everything American lead to selecting three hefty beautifully illustrated tomes as perfect additions on any coffee table for house guests to eye–especially those with a bent toward historical enrichment.
Snapshots
Remember the beloved family album? Paying homage to a time honored tradition at a time when the physical collection of photographs is largely immaterial through digital means and instant availability on photo-sharing websites like Flickr and Facebook, Photographic Memory: The Album in the Age of Photography (Aperture) looks at a mode of visual presentation that is an art form in and of itself, starting with the rise of the album at the turn of the 20th century to the present. Edited from the Library of Congress’s (co-publisher) collection by Verna Posever Curtis, a curator of Photography in the Prints & Photographs Division. $75.00 available from Amazon.
CLIFF HANGER
A house that is seemingly suspended over a cliff in a woodland setting, a breathtaking marvel of innovative daring, Fallingwater is a singular work completed in 1936 that secured Frank Lloyd Wright’s place among the architectural elite. Now on its 75th anniversary a commemorative edition Fallingwater (Rizzoli 2011) pays homage to this remarkable home that blends Wright’s Arts and Crafts influenced Americanism with European modernism. This landmark volume offers a reconsideration of Wright’s masterwork after extensive renovations, a process that the book finely details, and examines the home’s relationship to its setting and importance to sustainability–a precursor to the modern day green movement. $60.00 available through Amazon.
YE GOOD OLDE DAYS
Forward thinking in architecture often means reexamining an earlier aesthetic that has defied trends to remain a preferentially popular style. Nothing hits closer to home than American classical design. A richly illustrated book with archival photographs and decorative objectsThe American Style (The Monacelli Press) surveys the Colonial Revival movement from the 1890s to the present with an emphasis on 1900 to the 1930s. When New York’s highly touted architects McKim, Mead & White and Delano & Aldrich adapted the architectural vocabulary to design institutional buildings, banks, clubs, and department stores they created a hotbed of activity setting of a craze in other parts of the country for a nationalistic architectural style. Accompanying the summer exhibition of the same name at the Museum of The City of New York, The American Style is co-authored by Donald Albrecht, a curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum and Thomas Mellins an independent curator and architectural historian. $50.00 available through Amazon.
