Lessons from Modernism: Environmental Design Strategies in Architecture, 1925 - 1970

This valuable reference for today’s green building movement examines twentieth-century modern architecture, including buildings by Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer, through the lens of sustainability.   The hottest topics in contemporary architectural design and architectural history—the focus on sustainability and the evaluation of the modern movement—meet in Lessons from Modernism, a partnership with The Cooper Union that explores the ways in which the straightforward functional approach of modernist design creates environmentally sensitive solutions.   Lessons from Modernism provides new insights into 25 buildings by a diverse selection of architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Paul Rudolph, Jean Prouvé, and Arne Jacobsen, and demonstrates how these architects integrated environmental concerns into their designs. Buildings are located across the United States, Central and South America, Cuba, Japan and more—and include houses, art centers, commercial buildings, and civic buildings. Lessons from Modernism is an affordable reference work for all interested in how architecture intersects with the green movement, pairing full descriptions of all buildings with analytical essays, featuring charts of climate zones and solar movement, and concluding with a comprehensive chronology that details how environmental consciousness evolved throughout the twentieth century.

Kevin Bone is a professor at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union and a founding partner of Bone/Levine Architects. He was the general editor and a contributor to The New York Waterfront: Evolution and Building Culture of the Port and Harbor (1997).

Gina Pollara was the associate director of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Archive until September 2006. She was a contributor to The New York Waterfront and prepared the revised and updated edition in 2004.

Albert F. Appleton, a former Commissioner of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, is a Senior Fellow at the Regional Plan Association (RPA) in New York City and a Visiting Fellow at the City University of New York Institute on Urban Systems (CIUS).