Celebrating the ultimate masterpieces of modernist design, from the Arts and Crafts movement up to the twenty-first century, Total Design offers an intimate tour of houses conceived as complete works of art. Each of the spectacular houses making up Total Design demonstrates how an architect realized a unifying vision through all aspects of design—architecture, furniture, fittings, decorative objects, color, and gardens. Presenting masterpieces of modern architecture conceived as complete works of art inside and out, author George H. Marcus, a veteran chronicler of modernist design, delivers a highly accessible tour of the creations of some of the twentieth century’s greatest architects and designers, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto, Eero Saarinen, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and Gio Ponti. Together these masterworks of design offer a stunning survey of the many modes of modernist design, from the inventive refinement of Pierre Chareau to the colorful Nordic forms of Finn Juhl to the twenty-first-century expressionism of Daniel Libeskind.

About The Author

George H. Marcus, adjunct assistant professor of the history of art at the University of Pennsylvania, is coauthor of the pioneering survey Landmarks of Twentieth-Century Design and The Houses of Louis Kahn. His other publications include Masters of Modern Design, What Is Design Today?, and Le Corbusier: Inside the Machine for Living. For more than thirty years, he served as director of publications and graphic design at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.