"Columns of Smoke" is a four-volume collection. The first volume includes "Photography or Life" and "Popular Mies," which illuminate overlooked aspects of modern architecture and photography and reveal a more nuanced--and plausible--conception of the modern world.
In "Photography or Life," Juan JosE Lahuerta contrasts well-known images tied to the history of twentieth-century architecture with anonymous graphic materials and pictures from the popular press. In doing so, he demonstrates that pointing a camera at a building is neither natural nor innocent--it involves deliberate and...

In his "Columns of Smoke" series, Juan JosE Lahuerta takes on the enormously ambitious task of re-reading modernity, offering us fresh ways of looking at it while drawing new links between the ideas of architecture and ornamentation, with a special focus on how they have been treated in print.
While the first volume of "Columns of Smoke" considered epoch-making architect Adolf Loos's relationship with photography, here Lahuerta turns to the Classical strand in Loos's architecture and to his written work--and specifically his engagement with architectural and artistic theory. Lahuerta...