Overview

"Hal Foster, author of the acclaimed Design and Crime, argues that a fusion of architecture and art is a defining feature of contemporary culture. While architects such as Zaha Hadid and Herzog and de Meuron draw on art to reanimate design, architecture has inspired fundamental transformations in painting, sculpture and film, which are also explored here. The book includes an extensive conversation with Richard Serra. At the same time Foster points to a ""global style"" of architecture, as practiced by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, that is analogous to the ""international style"" of Le Corbusier, Gropius and Mies-a global style that, more than any art, conveys the look of modernity today, both its dreams and its delusions. In these ways Foster demonstrates that ""the art-architecture complex"" is a key indicator of broader social and economic trajectories and in urgent need of analysis and debate."

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9781844676897

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Reviews

Praise for Design and Crime Elegant and incisive essays.A Boston Review Foster writes with polemical verve and, at times, aphoristic cleverness.A Art in America For people who look toward critical theory as a way to out-think the powers that be rather than to disguise fuzzy thinking behind hermetic verbiage, Foster makes a lot of sense.A Village Voice Foster is spot-on - His 'radical anamnesis' is a notably stirring performance - exactly the kind of book the design world should want.A Bookforum

Brimming with ideas and analysis ... forceful, informed opinions. * Library Journal * A worldview expansive enough to see dominant tendencies in contemporary architecture and (fairly) recent art as flipsides of the same coin, and both as reflective of the contemporary political order. This, then, is criticism with vaulting ambitions. * Art Review * A timely tome with an urgent message for anyone on the art or architecture axis. * Time Out * As an architecture writer reading Foster, who comes from the direction of art theory, I find it refreshing to encounter a degree of intellectual rigour you don't find too often on my side of the fence. -- Rowan Moore * The Observer * [L]ike the inimitable Jeeves, Hal Foster's newest contribution to the genre stands alone. It's refreshing to find writing on design that isn't attempting to force a straightjacket of idiosyncratic theory onto the world at large. Foster writes because, through the fog of our distraught culture, he perceives an outline, the shape of something important and useful to our collective evolution and well-being, drilling into the complexities of contemporary architecture and art with unmatched clarity and social concern. Foster is terrific at unearthing the unintended consequences of our consumer-oriented culture on architectural/artistic ideas, in particular on those architects who imagine their work as critiques of consumerism. This book sets a standard for bona fide research into contemporary architectural theory and lays the groundwork upon which architects, artists and cultural observers can further reflect. -- JM Cava * Arcade * Writing on Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, Zaha Hadid, and Diller + Scofidio, among others, Foster parses such topics as function versus spectacle, the myth of transparency in glassy buildings, and the fetishism of materials, detailing and exposed infrastructure. He alludes to the symbolic, propagandistic service that giant, gleaming, futuristic buildings provide for their corporate clients ... we need more of his probing analysis and polemical rage against the machine. -- Ken Johnson * Art in America *

Author Information

Hal Foster is the author of numerous books, including The Art-Architecture Complex, The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha, Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency, and, with Richard Serra, Conversations about Sculpture. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he delivered the 2018 Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery in Washington. He teaches at Princeton University, co-edits the journal October, and contributes regularly to the London Review of Books.

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