Алан Кроуфорд – лучшие книги

Charles Rennie Mackintosh's finest work dates from about a dozen intensely creative years around 1900. His buildings in Glasgow, and especially his craggy masterpiece the Glasgow School of Art, are more complex and playful than any other work in Britain at that time. His interiors, many of them designed in collaboration with his wife, Margaret Macdonald, are both spare and sensuous; a world of heightened aesthetic sensibility inside the Willow Tea Rooms or The Hill House. And his inventive imagination, which played constantly with the shape of curves and squares, produced designs for furniture which transformed ordinary chairs into pieces of abstract sculpture. Finally, in the 1920s he painted a series of watercolours which are as original as anything he had done before. Since his death, Mackintosh has been both lauded as a pioneer of the Modern Movement and as a master of Art Nouveau.

Charles Robert Ashbee―architect, designer, social reformer, and a major force behind the Arts and Crafts Movement―was one of the most significant figures in British artistic and cultural life at the turn of the century. Inspired by the Romantic anti-industrialism of John Ruskin and William Morris, Ashbee started a small craft workshop in the East End of London in 1888 called the Guild of Handicraft. He not only made it a place where work could be satisfying and creative, but in 1902 boldly moved the Guild’s workshops out to the idyllic Cotswold town of Chipping Campden. Utilizing the often vivid journals kept by Ashbee and his wife, Janet, the book documents Ashbee’s life and work, the story of the Guild, and the part Ashbee played in a wide range of reform movements.