Age of the Masters: A Personal View of Modern Architecture by Reyner Banham is a polemical review of the legacy of the Modern Movement and the works of its greatest advocates: Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Richard Neutra, and Mies van Der Rohe. Banham writes about his own relationship between the International Style and comments on the dogmas and historiography of architectural modernism. The richly illustrated book examines examples of modern architecture and the theoretical principles that once were radical, but at the turn of the 1960s, had started to resemble ” a dead language like Sanskrit, codified its usages and dissected them with high philological professionalism”.
Modern architecture, in whatever quite and style, represents an ancient craft trying to keep pace with a technological situation that has long since transcended the handicrafts on which architecture was based, in a cultural context that has equally transcended that cosy little Mediterranean basin in which architecture as we know it was first practised as a self-conscious professional skill.
– Reyner Banham, Age of the Masters: A Personal View of Modern Architecture, Introduction, p. 3.
The copy currently in our stock is in good condition. The dust jacket shows some small signs of shelf wear, edge wear and use. The pages are clean, no markings. The previous owner has written their signature on the front flyleaf. Please note that the product photos are from our previous copy.
