Transformations in Modern Architecture

New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1979. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Trade paperback. Very good. The format is approximately 9 inches by 11.5 inches. 168 pages. Illustrated front and back covers with flaps. Illustrations. Arthur Justin Drexler (13 March 1925 - 16 January 1987) was a museum curator and director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) for 35 years.
Drexler attended the High School of Music and Art, and The Cooper Union studying architecture and served with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers during the Second World War. After the war Drexler worked with the office of industrial designer George Nelson and was Architecture Editor of Interiors magazine. Drexler joined the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1951 as Curator of Architecture and Design and was promoted to Director of the Department in 1956 succeeding Philip Johnson. Drexler has lectured at New York University, Yale University, Harvard University, Pratt Institute, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and other universities and institutions. Over thirty-five years Drexler conceived, organized and oversaw trailblazing exhibitions that foresaw major stylistic design developments in industrial design, architecture and landscaping. MoMA played a central role in examining the work of twentieth-century architects, among them Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Richard Neutra, Marcel Breuer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Drexler's pioneering shows promoted new ideas about architecture and design as modern arts and left an indelible mark on the course of midcentury modernism. In 1977, Drexler received the American Institute of Architects Medal for "vast contributions in documenting the art of architecture." The exhibition on which this book is based took place at The Museum of Modern Art, Nye York, from February 23 through April 24, 1979. Illustrated in black & white with 352 photographs of buildings and architectural models, with features on Louis Kahn, James Stirling, Robert Venturi, and others. During the previous two decades before this exhibition the history of modern architecture had been one of sorting out, developing, and transforming possibility implicit at the beginning. What has changed more than architectural pratices is the way we see buildings and talk about them. Underlying this change is the feeling that the modern movement in architectures understood by its pioneers is now over. That change in attitudes describes a hope (or a fear) rather than a fact, and it also focuses attention on the nature of modernism. The effects building produce are primarily and unavoidably visual. Modernism has valued buildings and artifacts that are well made and do what is required of them. In that sense it has been against interpretation, preferring instead the self-evident fitness of things. As interpretation is again required, it will collide with fitness. We are still dealing with the conflict between art an technology that best the nineteenth century, and which the modern movement expected to resolve.