Park Books New Titles Catalog 2018/19

Brings to light again a little-known movement
within the physical culture-driven architectural
avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s
Highlights the mark the concept has left on
modern domestic aesthetic as we know it
and demonstrates its significance also for
contemporary architecture and design
Features previously unpublished archival
photographs, diagrams, and redrawn plans
Sport and stadium, instead of art
and museum: a largely forgotten
yet still influential design concept
of the 1920s and 1930s
Modern architecture’s evolution during the interwar period represents one of the most
radical turns in Western design history. While the role new materials and modes of
production played in this development is beyond dispute, of equal importance was the
emergence of a distinctly modern physical culture. Largely unacknowledged today,
new conceptions of body and movement had a profound influence on how architects
designed not only public spaces like gymnasiums or stadiums, but also domestic spaces.
Hannes Meyer, Swiss modernist and director of the Bauhaus in Dessau from 1928
to 1930, colorfully encapsulated this phenomenon as “the advanced school of collective
feeling.”
In this new book, the authors explore the impact of physical culture during the 1920s
and 1930s on the thinking of some of modern architecture’s most influential figures.
Using archival photographs, diagrams, and redrawn plans, they reconstruct an obscure
constellation of domestic projects by Marcel Breuer, Charlotte Perriand, Richard
Neutra, Franco Albini, and others, that demonstrate these architects’ response to, and
attempt to dictate, the relationship between the body and the spaces and objects that
give it shape. They argue that the impact of sport on modern architecture was a discursive
phenomenon, best understood by going beyond a mere typological reading of
the stadium or gymnasium, to an examination of how gymnastic equipment and other
trappings of physical culture were folded into the domestic space.
Nile Greenberg is the founder of NILE,
a New York-based design studio.
Mathew Kennedy is an architect based in
Mexico City.
Nile Greenberg, Matthew Kennedy
The Advanced School of
Collective Feeling
Inhabiting Modern Physical Culture, 1926–38
Paperback
approx. 176 pages, 140 b/w illustrations
17 × 24 cm (6½ × 9½ in)
978-3-03860-107-4 English
sFr. 49.00 | € 48.00 | £ 45.00 | $ 49.00
March 2019 (Europe) | May 2019 (US)
NEW TITLES 12/13