Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia and Other Writings

Karel TeigeIntroduction by Jean-Louis CohenTranslations by Irena Murray and David Britt The writings of graphic designer, prolific critic, and avant-garde partisan Karel Teige (1900-1951) represent one of the great forgotten legacies of modern artistic theory. Together with Jaromír Krejcar and Josef Chocol, he founded the radical Devetsil group in 1920, an organization committed to promoting international modernism through manifestos and polemics.  After meeting Le Corbusier in Paris in 1922, Teige increasingly turned his attention to architecture. Over the next decade he crystallized his ideas on functionalist and constructivist practice through relationships with ideological allies including Adolf Behne, Theo van Doesburg, Hannes Meyer, and El Lissitzky. In Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia (published in 1930), Teige both publicized the modernist efforts of his native country, and aligned them with the avant-garde efforts of the East and West. Now in English for the first time, t