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Summary
Author: Ashbee, C.R.
Title: Where the great city stands. A study in the new civics.
Publication: London, Essex House Press (and B.T. Batsford) 1917.
Price: £420
Reference: 09206
Full Description
4to. xii + 164 + (2)pp, a further printed leaf with Essex House Press advert, 121 ills partly on 76pp of photo plates and partly on text pages. Publisher's pictorial printed boards, cloth spine (binding designed by Ashbee). From the library of the Art Workers Guild, with their bookplate. Crease in front free endpaper, otherwise a very good, clean copy.
Ashbee's most substantial presentation of his ideas on architecture, the arts, town planning and modern life in general, showing the respective influences on him of Bodley, Morris, Frank Lloyd Wright, the English Arts and Crafts movement and American Beaux Arts classicism. It is still stimulating reading today, and British admirers of the conversion of London's South Bank power station into Tate Modern may not all be aware that in Ashbee's scheme for an art institute, illustrated here, the principal exhibition area would be positioned directly on top of a "power centre" from which light and heat would radiate outwards to subsidiary buildings and workshops.