By one of the most famous and influential architectural historians and critics, a selection of essays on the relationship between the "machine" and architecture.
[Architecture of the Second Machine Age] The themes of modernity and postmodernity, seen through the work of leading international architects: F.L. Wright, Renzo Piano, Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn, James Stirling, Rudolf Schindler, Jean Prouvé.
This collection offers, for the first time in Italian translation, a series of essays first published in English-language magazines, which has become a fundamental reference point for bibliographies of architectural history after the Second World War. This is the period covered by the writings selected for this edition, from over 700 articles and essays by Banham. The theme of modernity, and postmodernity, is approached by the author through some of the most important figures of the world architecture scene. But the leitmotiv of the collection is Banham’s focus on the machine in relation to architectural phenomena. The aesthetic of the automobiles of the 1950s, the freeways of Los Angeles, the lights of Las Vegas, the futuristic dwellings of Buckminster Fuller, the mobile cities of Archigram, the “spaceship” of the Centre Pompidou by Rogers and Piano are all different phenomena that can be connected with a culture of the “second machine age”.