In The Springboard in the Pond, Thomas van Leeuwen looks at the domestic swimming pool and discovers an icon indispensable to the reading of twentieth-century modernism. At one level, the book is a rereading of modern architecture that will leave that story permanently altered. At another level, it is the story of the origin and evolution of the private swimming pool as a building type and cultural artifact. And at still another level, it is a material philosophy of water.
Inside Architecture is a concise, insightful examination of the role the modernist project has played in late twentieth-century building, as well as an attempt to reconcile the dilemmas and shortcomings of modern orthodoxy with a renewed vision of modernism.
