Book Description
This book is like a journey through the modern architecture of the 20th century and, at the same time, an aesthetic and conceptual reflection on photographic vision. Paolo Rosselli, one of the leading exponents of landscape photography in Italy since the early 1980s, has assembled in this volume the traces of a multi-form, antagonistic, problematic itinerary through some of the icons of the Modern Movement and an overview of the more advanced international contemporary architecture. The works of Aldo Rossi, Luigi Moretti, Le Corbusier, Rafael Moneo, Frank O Gehry, Santiago Caltrava, Frank Lloyd Wright, Herzog & De Meuron, Rem Koolhaas and others become an opportunity to reflect through photography on Modern spatiality in relation to the city, its profile, and its interior landscape.

A difficult, often conflictual relationship exists between everyday life, the life of the man-on-the-street and Modern works. Problematically recounted through these images, this long visual reflection seeks to disrupt the fixed mind-set with which we have always looked at these 20th-century masterpieces.

The volume follows a dual track, represented by the written commentary of Dennis Sharp and of the author, which intersects with the dense sequence of images mounted in an arrangement that constantly moves on and around the theme of architecture lost in the architecture lost in the contemporary metropolis.

The photographs cover the time span of the past twenty years, from Paolo Rosselli's early Indian travels exploring Chandigarh up to his most recent architectural inquiries, revealing a gradual evolution in his photographic vision, and, more generally, the problematic course of contemporary photography.


About the Author
Dennis Sharp is an architect-and a well-known British writer and critic and exhibition curator and designer. He graduate from the AA School, London and Liverpool University. He has taught widely at Manchester, London, Columbia, New York, Adelaide, and Nottingham universities. Now a professor, International Academy of Architecture, he was Senior Lecturer and founder-editor of AA Quarterly, 1968-92, and later editor of World Architecture International Architecture. He received the medaille d'argent of the Academie d'Architecture in 1992 and a Jean Tschumi Award from the International Union of Architects in 1993. Editor and author of many books including 20th Century Architecture: A Visual History, The Modern Movement in Architecture, and monographs on Manfredi Nicoletti, Bauhaus, and Santiago Calatrava whose retrospective exhibition he curated at the RIBA in 1992. Dennis Sharp's recent architectural work includes a Visitor Centre for the Grand National, Aintree and the renovation of the first Modern thin wall concrete Modernist house in England (1934) by Colin Lucas, one of the trio Connell Ward and Lucas on whom he is preparing a major monograph.

Born in Milan in 1952, Paolo Rosselli begins taking photographs at the age of 18 after a brief apprenticeship with Ugo Mulas. After the university degree in architecture, he dedicates himself entirely to photography. In the early 1980s he accompanies art historian Arturo Schwarz on a series of extended stays in India where he photographs temple architecture.

In 1984 he initiates a study of the relationship of architecture to environment in Engadin, Switzerland, photographing buildings, landscape and scenes of daily life. Around the same time he begins contributing to the architecture quarterly Lotus International and other Italian and foreign magazines. He does photo essays on contemporary architecture in Spain, Germany, France and other countries, which in turn generate other publications, including architectural monographs and a broader range of additional city profiles.

In 1993 he is invited to the XLV Venice Biennial to participate in the exhibition "Photography and Landscape after the Avant-garde", where he shows a group of works which thematise the fragmentary messages, words and signs found in the contemporary urban landscape.

In more recent years, his major projects examine the following subjects. The architecture of the '50s and '60s in Milan-an extensive study on post-war reconstruction. An exploration of Renaissance architecture in Rome, Florence, and Milan, dedicated to the art historian Jacob Burckhardt.

In all, he is the author of a dozen books, and has shown his work throughout Italy, Europe and USA. Rosselli lives and works in Milan.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Paolo Rosselli has been photographing the work of the best European modern architects for the last 30 years. His photographs are a record of the magnificent structures created by Santiago Calatrava, Renzo Piano, Juan Navarro Baldeweg, Gio Ponti and many others.

The book presents a selection of over 100 extraordinary shots taken by Rosselli worldwide from the early Seventies to the present to major and most impressive masterpieces of modern architecture: from the Vitra Design Museum (Weil am Rhein) by Frank Gehry to Sturgess House (Los Angeles) by Frank Lloyd Wright, from Oriente Station (Lisbon) by Santiago Calatrava to Charing Cross (London) by Terry Farell, from Carlo Felice Theatre (Genoa) by Aldo Rossi to S. Maria degli Angeli (Monte Tamaro) by Mario Botta, from the Petite Maison (Vevey) by Le Corbusier to the Congress Hall (Salamanca) by Juan Navarro Baldeweg.