Anxious Modernisms


Book Description

A book on architecture's other modernisms that flourished and faded in the period after World War II.




Mediating Modernism


Book Description

Well illustrated, Mediating Modernism demonstrates how architectural books and journals have created the architectural culture of the twentieth century and that nowhere is this truer than in Britain.




Sanctioning Modernism


Book Description

In the decades following World War II, modern architecture spread around the globe alongside increased modernization, urbanization, and postwar reconstruction—and it eventually won widespread acceptance. But as the limitations of conventional conceptions of modernism became apparent, modern architecture has come under increasing criticism. In this collection of essays, experienced and emerging scholars take a fresh look at postwar modern architecture by asking what it meant to be “modern,” what role modern architecture played in constructing modern identities, and who sanctioned (or was sanctioned by) modernism in architecture. This volume presents focused case studies of modern architecture in three realms—political, religious, and domestic—that address our very essence as human beings. Several essays explore developments in Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia and document a modernist design culture that crossed political barriers, such as the Iron Curtain, more readily than previously imagined. Other essays investigate various efforts to reconcile the concerns of modernist architects with the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church and other Christian institutions. And a final group of essays looks at postwar homebuilding in the United States and demonstrates how malleable and contested the image of the American home was in the mid-twentieth century. These inquiries show the limits of canonical views of modern architecture and reveal instead how civic institutions, ecclesiastical traditions, individual consumers, and others sought to sanction the forms and ideas of modern architecture in the service of their respective claims or desires to be modern.




Louis Kahn's Situated Modernism


Book Description

She demonstrates instead that Kahn's architecture is grounded in his deeply held modernist political, social, and artistic ideals, which guided him as he sought to rework modernism into a socially transformative architecture appropriate for the postwar world.".




Modernism's Magic Hat


Book Description

Examines the role of architecture in the history of global development and decolonization.




Modernism and the Middle East


Book Description

This provocative collection of essays is the first book-length treatment of the development of modern architecture in the Middle East. Ranging from Jerusalem at the turn of the twentieth century to Libya under Italian colonial rule, postwar Turkey, and on to present-day Iraq, the essays cohere around the historical encounter between the politics of nation-building and architectural modernism's new materials, methods, and motives. Architecture, as physical infrastructure and as symbolic expression, provides an exceptional window onto the powerful forces that shaped the modern Middle East and that continue to dominate it today. Experts in this volume demonstrate the political dimensions of both creating the built environment and, subsequently, inhabiting it. In revealing the tensions between achieving both international relevance and regional meaning, Modernism in the Middle East affords a dynamic view of the ongoing confrontations of deep traditions with rapid modernization. Political and cultural historians, as well as architects and urban planners, will find fresh material here on a range of diverse practices.




On the Wings of Modernism


Book Description

"Nauman argues that contrary to the technological and teleological interpretations presented by the polemicists of "international style" modernism, the academy's actual production was squarely grounded in bureaucratic and political processes. He demonstrates that selection of both the site and the design firm was the result of political maneuverings involving the U.S. military leadership."--BOOK JACKET.




The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory


Book Description

"Offers an intense scholarly experience in its comprehensiveness, its variety of voices and its formal organization... the editors took a risk, experimented and have delivered a much-needed resource that upends the status-quo." - Architectural Histories, journal of the European Architectural History Network "Architectural theory interweaves interdisciplinary understandings with different practices, intentions and ways of knowing. This handbook provides a lucid and comprehensive introduction to this challenging and shifting terrain, and will be of great interest to students, academics and practitioners alike." - Professor Iain Borden, UCL Bartlett School of Architecture "In this collection, architectural theory expands outward to interact with adjacent discourses such as sustainability, conservation, spatial practices, virtual technologies, and more. We have in The Handbook of Architectural Theory an example of the extreme generosity of architectural theory. It is a volume that designers and scholars of many stripes will welcome." - K. Michael Hays, Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory, Harvard University The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory documents and builds upon the most innovative developments in architectural theory over the last two decades. Bringing into dialogue a range of geographically, institutionally and historically competing positions, it examines and explores parallel debates in related fields. The book is divided into eight sections: Power/Difference/Embodiment Aesthetics/Pleasure/Excess Nation/World/Spectacle History/Memory/Tradition Design/Production/Practice Science/Technology/Virtuality Nature/Ecology/Sustainability City/Metropolis/Territory. Creating openings for future lines of inquiry and establishing the basis for new directions for education, research and practice, the book is organized around specific case studies to provide a critical, interpretive and speculative enquiry into the relevant debates in architectural theory.




Shaping the City to Come


Book Description

This study reassesses modern architecture and town planning in mid-twentieth-century England, highlighting ideas and debates that were in circulation as modernist ideals gradually took root. The book reveals an architectural culture that was serious, active, and visionary, with impact that extended into the postwar years. Through close studies of specific works and writings, the author acknowledges the importance of the international context of modern architecture as it intersected with the variety of narratives that defined English modernism, such as national identity, the New Empiricism, and the picturesque, taking into account the large community of émigré architects who settled in England with the approach of World War II, as well as a more general dissemination of international style forms and theories from continental Europe. The book places familiar figures such as Berthold Lubetkin and Ernö Goldfinger, as well as projects such as Tecton’s Penguin Pool and the Festival of Britain’s “Live Architecture” Exhibition, in new light, presenting a rich picture of the modern architectural climate in England. The study draws attention to the debates, proposals, and processes that fed into the development of modernist, urban-minded, and forward-looking architectural ideals.




Turkey


Book Description

Turkey: Modern Architectures in History offers a journey through the iconic buildings of Turkey that begins with the end of World War I, when the new Turkish Republic was born out of the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, includes its democratization in the midst of the Cold War’s competing ideologies, and concludes with the present day, in which Turkey continues to be dramatically transformed through globalization, economic integration, and a renewed appreciation for its Islamic and Ottoman heritage. Sibel Bozdogan and Esra Akcan explore modern institutional masterpieces and architect-designed buildings through the decades. Their focus includes informal residential plans, and they discuss how these have evolved from small settlements to colossal urban quarters that exist at a slippery threshold of legality. This richly informative history of Turkey’s built environment goes beyond typical surveys of Western modern architecture and is unique in tackling the issue of the modern and contemporary periods that are often omitted in studies of Islamic art and architecture. Offering a perceptive overview of modern Turkish architecture, this book places it within the larger social, political, and cultural context of the country’s development as a modern nation in the twentieth century.