Bøker av Mari Hvattum

Anish Kapoor (b. 1954) is one of the most influential artists of our time. Over the past four decades, the Indian-British artist has created a body of ground- breaking works out of materials such as wax, stone, pigment and polished stainless steel. Kapoor’s monumental works simultaneously envelop and over- whelm the observer. At the same time, the artist examines what we cannot see, through his iconic works that distort the exhibition spaces and the architecture in which they are embedded.This book was published in conjunction with the exhibition Anish Kapoor – Unseen at the ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art. It offers a unique insight into how the artist’s use of materials, surfaces and colours has evolved and been refined from the early years of his career to the present. Four essays and an interview with Anish Kapoor delve into an array of poetic, philosophical and existential questions prompted by Kapoor’s seductive and sometimes disturbing works.

How modern notions of architectural style were born—and the debates they sparked in nineteenth-century Germany.The term style has fallen spectacularly out of fashion in architectural circles. Once a conceptual key to understanding architecture’s inner workings, today style seems to be associated with superficiality, formalism, and obsolete periodization. But how did style—once defined by German sociologist Georg Simmel as a place where one is “no longer alone”—in architecture actually work? How was it used and what did it mean? In Style and Solitude, Mari Hvattum seeks to understand the apparent death of style, returning to its birthplace in the late eighteenth century, and charting how it grew to influence modern architectural discourse and practice. As Hvattum explains, German thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century offered competing ideas of what style was and how it should be applied in architecture. From Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s thoughtful eclecticism to King Maximilian II’s attempt to capture the zeitgeist in an architectural competition, style was at the center of fascinating experiments and furious disputes. Starting with Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s invention of the period style and ending a century later with Gottfried Semper’s generative theory of style, Hvattum explores critical debates that are still ongoing today.

Drawing on architectural and urban history, as well as philosophy and sociology, this title traces the 'modern' project through its multifarious manifestation in order to understand contemporary culture.