The Life Of Walter Gropius: Visionary Founder of the Bauhaus - Hardcover

Maccarthy Fiona

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571295134 ISBN 13: 9780571295135

Verlag: Faber And Faber Ltd, 2019

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Críticas:

This is an absolute triumph - ideas, lives and the dramas of the twentieth century are woven together in a feat of storytelling. A masterpiece. (Edmund de Waal)

Engrossing ... MacCarthy's approach to biography has been to combine an appreciation of design and art with a willingness to delve into the personal lives of her subjects. This book is no exception .. MacCarthy's book does justice to these achievements ... Moving and vivid ... As a way of bringing the human stories of this extraordinary phenomenon to life, it's hard to beat. (Rowan Moore Observer (Book of the Day))

MacCarthy has a gift ... By the end of this commanding, intelligent, gripping biography, I was, like Alma, Ise and those three spurned lovers, strangely mesmerised by Gropius the man. (Laura Freedom Times)

Absorbing ... MacCarthy's biography leaps to life whenever Alma Mahler appears ... Covers the impressive career with admirable accuracy and command ... [An] excellent biographer. (Philip Hensher Spectator)

Saint or sinner? Visionary or myopic? In the century since the Bauhaus opened, its founder Walter Gropius has been lionised and demonised. Did Gropius inspire the world's most influential and humane art school, or was he the evil genius of miserable industrial culture ? Fiona MacCarthy is Britain's first and best writer on design. She rescues Gropius' reputation in a book full of learning, insight, dry wit and belief. Just like the man himself. (Stephen Bayley)

Almost a century ago Walter Gropius recognised the rich imaginative possibilities, and the opportunities for technological innovation, offered by the shopping malls, high-rise housing and industrial development of a future urban environment. He might have built it here too, if Britain had grasped what he had to offer when he left Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Gropius, too often dismissed as a chilly theorist, emerges in a clearer, subtler and far more sympathetic light from Fiona MacCarthy's wide-ranging and authoritative biography. (Hilary Spurling)

Up to now, Gropius has been presented in histories of design and architecture as a rigid, doctrinaire stick-in-the-mud type - as arrogant and dry as some of the Bauhaus curricula. Critical attitudes to his architecture have been projected onto the man himself. By digging deep into his personal history, and spiritual beliefs, Fiona MacCarthy has rescued Walter Gropius from this lazy characterisation - and brought him back to life as a passionate, conflicted, sometimes childlike sometimes heroic human being, a man of deep and well-concealed feelings. With new material on Gropius's relationships with Alma Mahler and Ilse (or Ise) Frank, and especially on the tragic story of his daughter Manon (or Mutzi), with a page-turning account of his active service as a Hussar in the First World War, and with a welcome emphasis on the students at the Bauhaus as well as the staff, McCarthy has helped us to see Gropius in a radically different light. This is a very significant biography of a very significant man. ((Professor Sir) Christopher Frayling, former Rector of the Royal College of Art and Chair of the Design Council and Arts Council England.)

MacCarthy's enjoyable biography is an impressive achievement, finally giving us not just Gropius the architect in black and white, but the human being in full colour. (Evening Standard)

A complex narrative about a complex man. Fiona MacCarthy's richly detailed biography of Walter Gropius, one of the twentieth century's most influential architects, reads like a detective story. (Moshe Safdie, founding principal of Moshe Safdie Architects)

An excellent and long-awaited biography ... MacCarthy is especially skilled at teasing out the connections between an artist or writer's emotional life and their work. (Financial Times)

Reseña del editor:

*BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK * *Illustrated with over 130 colour photographs and drawings* In her majestic biography of Walter Gropius, charismatic founder of the Bauhaus, Fiona MacCarthy argues that his visionary ideas still influence the way we live, work, and think today. 'An absolute triumph.' Edmund de Waal, bestselling author of The Hare with Amber Eyes 'Moving and vivid ... Hard to beat.' Rowan Moore, Observer 'Commanding, intelligent, gripping.' Laura Freeman, Times Mention the Bauhaus and iconic objects such as a Marianne Brandt teapot, an Anni Albers weaving or a Marcel Breuer chair leap to mind. But the Bauhaus was more than an art school - it was the birth of a radical new philosophy of design: a constellation of talents including Kandinsky, Klee and Moholy-Nagy, at the heart of which was Walter Gropius. MacCarthy grippingly narrates the story of the ground-breaking architect's life beginning with his shattering experiences in World War One before his turbulent marriage to the notorious Alma Mahler and the tragic death of their daughter. After Gropius' agonized decision to leave Nazi Germany in 1933, she explores his life in exile by tracing how a disorientating period in London evolved into a peaceful marriage with Ise Gropius and his late starring role in twentieth-century architecture in America. Challenging views of Gropius as a doctrinaire modernist, MacCarthy's modern reassessment of Gropius' interior life is biography at its finest: insightful, witty, and gloriously three-dimensional.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: Faber And Faber Ltd
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0571295134
• ISBN 13: 9780571295135
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 1