The grand palaces and princely villas of the Bavarian Wittelsbach dynasty—Nymphenburg, Schleissheim, the vast Residenzschloss in Munich, and others—impress visitors with their great halls and intimate cabinets, dramatic stairhalls and seemingly endless rows of sumptuously decorated rooms. But these dazzling residences did not exist solely to delight the eye. In The Utility of Splendor, Samuel John Klingensmith discusses how, over the years, successive rulers reshaped the internal spaces of their residences to reflect changes in the elaborate ceremony that regulated daily life at court.

Drawing on a broad range of sources, including building documents, correspondence, diaries, and court regulations, Klingensmith investigates the intricacies of Bavarian court practice and shows that Versailles was only one among several influences on German palace planning. Klingensmith offers a cogent, detailed understanding of the relations between architectural spaces and the ceremonial, social, and private life that both required and used them. Handsomely illustrated with photographs and plans, The Utility of Splendor will appeal to anyone interested in how life was lived among the nobility during the last centuries of the old regime.

Samuel John Klingensmith (1949-1986) was assistant professor of art history at Tulane University.

In the summer of 1927, in a suburb of Stuttgart, an exhibition housing settlement built by sixteen of the leading architects of the Modern Movement opended to the public. Greeted as a major event by advocates and opponents of the new architecture, the Weissenhof Siedling continues to excite strong interest. This unusally cohesive yet varied group of apartment buildings, row houses, and single-family houses—hailed by Philip Johnson as "the most important group of buildings in modern architecture"—remains a critical project in the history of twentieth-century architecture. Richard Pommer and Christian F. Otto offer a comprehensive account of Weissenhof in relation to the emergence and reception of modern architecture in the 1920s.

Recipient of the Award for Excellence in Professional and Scholarly Publishing