A fundamental tenet of the historiography of modern architecture holds that cubism forged a vital link between avant-garde practices in early twentieth-century painting and architecture. This publication, the first historically focused examination of the issue, returns to the original site of cubist art in pre-First World War Europe and investigates the historical, theoretical, and socio-political relationships between avant-garde practices in paintings, architecture, and other cultural forms, including poetry, landscape, and the decorative arts.

The book offers multiple perspectives on the relationship between architecture and cubism, showing that although there were many points of intersection between them, there was no simple direct link. As the essays suggest, the significance of cubism for architecture was as a method of representing modern spatial experience, of submitting the ambiguity and indeterminacy of that experience to the ordering impulses of art.

Edited by Eve Blau and Nancy J. Troy
Essays by Jay Bochner, Yve-Alain Bois, Beatriz Colomina, David Cottington, Robert L. Herbert, Dorothée Imbert, Detlef Mertins, Kevin D. Murphy, Irena Žantovská Murray, Paul Overy, and Bruno Reichlin
Graphic design by Danielseed Design

Co-published in 1997 with The MIT Press

Hardcover or softcover, 266 pages