SHEILA, Crane

Mediterranean crossroads Marseille and modern architecture - University of Minnesota Press 2011 - 352 p. Couv. ill. en coul., ill. en noir et en coul.

This book traces the architectural and spatial evolutionof Marseille from the 1920s through the post-World War II building boom. Its six chapters divide this time span roughlyin half, with the war itself marking the midpoint. Chapters One and Two focus on ideas of and plans for Marseille as amodern metropolis in the interwar period. Here the work of the Bauhaus photographer/Filmmaker Laszoَ Moholy–Nagy,the urban planner Jacques Gréber, and the art and architec-ture critic Siegfried Giedion are usefully brought together fora discussion of Marseille’s distinctive transporter bridge (amobile platform ferry) as, simultaneously, an “iconic exem-plar of modern spatial transparency” and a harbinger of thefuture ruins of modern architecture in Marseille.

978-0816653621

--Urban physiognomy, modern architecture, Marseille