Visionary Architecture of the 20th Century: Master Drawings from Frank Lloyd Wright to Aldo Rossi (1982)

The twentieth century has produced architecture of almost unprecedented verve and variety—architecture that has altered our range of available living possibilities beyond all recognition. We are aware, most often, of the buildings that reach completion, but it is a fact that many of the memorable images of twentieth-century architecture have remained drawings. Some were intended to be built; some were conceived as ideas only. But whatever the aim, drawings have often embodied the intentions of our present-day architects more vividly than the finished buildings.

The 168 stunning drawings selected and annotated by V. Magnago Lampugnani range widely through all the important trends of our century. Here are telling and exquisite works by, amongst others, the pioneers of modernism, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto; by expressionists such as Häring, Taut and Poelzig; by those architects with a passion for using the products and systems of technology such as Buckminster Fuller and Norman Foster, as well as the key figures of the post-modernism movement and experimentalist groups—Archigram, Haus-Rucker-Co. and Coop Himmelblau.

The first thoughts of many of them appear here in their original sketches: utopian townscapes and futuristic dwellings rub shoulders with more familiar and formal designs, each in the highly individual style of its creator. Together they illustrate in an unusually fresh and direct manner the extent of creative exploration in the realm of architecture from 1910 to today.