Willem Marinus Dudok, A Dutch Modernist: A Bio-Bibliography
By (Author) Donald Langmead
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Greenwood Press
18th April 1996
United States
Tertiary Education
Non Fiction
Individual architects and architectural firms
Theory of architecture
Biography: general
Bibliographies, catalogues
720.92
Hardback
304
Width 156mm, Height 235mm
595g
This self-taught Dutch architect was among the most widely copied architects of the 1930s and 1940s. His international influence is all the more amazing when one considers that most of his architecture was built in the provincial town of Hilversum. Travel, word-of-mouth, and literature spread the news of his humane, modern approach to building design. The more than 1,200 bibliographic entries in this work are presented alphabetically by decades and further by genres. Each is summarised, described and evaluated in the context of a critical overview of Dudok's career. Architectural scholars and students should profit from this comprehensive guide to the international literature on one of the most emulated champions of modern architecture. For too long, much was made in the English-language architectural literature of Germany's pioneer role in developing Modernism. That contribution was undeniably valuable, but the Dutch were unfairly overlooked; however, Dudok's work was not. Hilversum became a magnet for young foreign architects in the 1930s. He cast his spell upon much of continental Europe, the United States and Britain, and throughout the 1940s his style was so widely mimicked that a new adjective was coined: "dudoky". This volume reintroduces the importance of Dudok's work to today's scholars and students.
DONALD LANGMEAD is Associate Professor and Director of Research in the Faculty of Aert, Architecture, and Design at the University of South Australia. He has studied architectural history in England and The Netherlands and has published a number of books and articles in the oddly contrasting fields of Australian colonial architecture and Dutch modernism. He and Donald Leslie Johnson are authors of Makers of 20th-Century Modern Architecture, (Greenwood, 1996).