"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...

Juan Jose Lahuerta's Columns of Smoke series offers bold new readings of modernity and its key figures while redefining the connections between architecture, ornamentation, and the portrayal of both in print media. The third volume focuses on the Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926), whose spectacular fin-de-siecle bohemian modernism stood in revolutionary contrast to the leading approaches of the day.
With the rise of Le Corbusier's modern style of architecture in the early twentieth century, architects who favored ornamentation and a strong bond with nature, like Gaudi,...