20Th - Century decorating arquitecture & gardens – Weidenfeld and Nicolson – 1980 – Dura

**20Th - Century decorating arquitecture & gardens**: 80 Years of ideas & Pleasure from House & Garden.

This entharalling panorama of the way we have lived for the past eighty years is a history of taste since the birth of House & Garden at the beginning of the century. 20th-Century Decorating, Architecture &Gardens presents the most dramatic and important developments in interior design, architecture, and gardens as they first appeared to American and European readers. It brings to life most vividly the changing styles and fashions of each decade, from the richly ornate rooms in the Lewisohn and Roosevelt houses in the 1910s, to the spare, natural designs of Michael Taylor and John Dickinson in the 1960s and 1970s.

The illustrations document social change in a highly personal way, as people learned to live without servants and welcomed instead electricity, the automobile, the telepone, and now, computers. The work of all the most important people in the field of decorative arts and architecture is shown here -including the Viennese school of Josef Hoffmann and Emil Ruhlmann, Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer of the Bauhaus, and the pioneer American designers such as Elsie de Wolfe and Ruby Ross Wood. Original photographs of all the great American, British, and European houses enhance our knowledge not only of how past generations lived, but what kind of legacy in style and design they have passed down to our children.
Writers such as Dorothy Parker, Aldous Huxley, Daphne du Maurier, and Vita Sackville-West enrich the pages with their own stories about living well, and three experts whose lifetimes almost completely span the tumultuous years covered in the book write introductory essays on what they have seen - Billy Baldwin, Pietro Belluschi, and Russell Page. Through their eyes we relive the pressures, problems, and successes thra transformed taste through eight decades.
20th Century Decorating, Architcture & Gardens is not only a dazzling visual document about decorating ideas that can be put into practice today, but, like looking through a window, it also reveals the intimate changes in the way people have lived in our extraordinary century.