Modernist Architecture and Ruins: On Ruins as a Minus, Neoclassicism and the Uncanny.

Previous research has suggested that in cultural production fields the concatenation of eminence explains success, defined as influence and innovation. We propose that individuals in fields as diverse as philosophy, literature, mathematics, painting, or architecture gain visibility by cumulating the eminence of others connected to them across and within generations. We draw on interaction ritual chain and social movement theories, and use evidence from the field of modernist architecture, to formulate a model of how networks of very (...) strong ties generate motivations and emotional enthusiasm, change reputations, and form collective movements that over time transform the structure of cultural fields. Because major aesthetic innovations break sharply with older styles, they need very strong group solidarity over a long period of time to propagate a new standard of practice. We propose mutual halo effects, i.e., the reciprocal reinforcement of upstream and downstream prestige on a given individual node, as the key factor accounting for success in a cultural production field. We discuss the relevance of these results for building a model of influence and innovation in cultural production fields in which networks—reshaped by shifting technological, political, and economic conditions—trigger new styles. (shrink)

According to Thomas Kuhn, the entrenchment of a paradigm, especially in the critical stages when facing anomalies, requires the further suppression of competing ideas. This essay addresses the unconscious entrenchment of European modernist aesthetics in the everyday, especially in the American suburbs of the 1950s, and its popular and cultural manifestations. Taking Levittown as a starting point, modernist architectural principles have since its construction radiated into the mass-housing market and materialized in housing development projects that have led to (...) the rise of suburbia and, more recently, the New Urbanism. Despite the conventional separations of modernism from the more criticized mass-housing development, the same principles of security, shelter, community, and utopia are present in each. Presented by some architects as a postmodernist aesthetic, the central tenets of modernism are still pursued and reimagined as timeless principles in the building of new housing communities, recycled and reconstituted to meet the dreams and desires of the public—a utopia that is both avant-garde and kitsch. (shrink)

Through analysing different case studies in the Middle East, this section uses rooted cosmopolitanism as a theoretical lens to explore exported modernism and architecture between socialist and capitalist countries during the Cold War. This research analyses the circulation and local applications of urban development and modernisation paradigms in so-called ‘Third World’ countries. For assessing the socialist and capitalist-inspired modernisation processes in the Middle East, this chapter studies the cosmopolitan and trans-cultural architecture created by global and local influences. Comparing (...) two types of cosmopolitan architecture (socialist and capitalist) during the Cold War period in third-world contexts will help us to analyse and compare their relative rootedness and to learn from the interconnected, multifaceted, and multilayered planning transfers and architectural exportations. (shrink)

On 15 October 1959, Rudolf Carnap, a leading member of the recently founded Vienna Circle, came to lecture at the Bauhaus in Dessau, southwest of Berlin. Carnap had just finished his magnum opus, The Logical Construction of the World, a book that immediately became the bible of the new antiphilosophy announced by the logical positivists. From a small group in Vienna, the movement soon expanded to include an international following, and in the sixty years since has exerted a powerful sway (...) over the conduct of the philosophy of science as well as over wide branches of philosophy, economics, psychology, and physics. The site of Carnap’s lecture that day, the Dessau Bauhaus, was a stunning building designed by Walter Gropius and dedicated just three years earlier. Protected by its flat roof and glass walls, the artists, architects, weavers, and furniture designers had made the school a citadel of high modernism. It was here that Carnap addressed an enthusiastic audience on “Science and Life.” “I work in science,” he began, “and you in visible forms; the two are only different sides of a single life.”1 In this paper I will explore this “single life” of which the new philosophy and the new art were to be different facets; in the process, I hope to cast light on the shared modernist impulses that drove both disciplines in the interwar years. 1. Rudolf Carnap, lecture notes for his Bauhaus lecture, “Wissenschaft und Leben,” prepared 1 Oct. 1929 and delivered 15 Oct. 1929, transcription from shorthand by Gerald Heverly, Carnap Papers in the Archives of Scientific Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh Libraries, University of Pittsburgh , document RC 110-07-49. Quoted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh. All rights reserved. Translations are my own unless otherwise noted. Peter Galison is associate professor in the departments of philosophy and physics at Stanford University, where he co-chairs the program in the history of science. His primary interest is in the history and philosophy of experimentation, the subject of his How Experiments End and Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research, edited with Bruce Hevly . His current project is entitled Image and Logic: The Material Culture of Modern Physics. (shrink)

A discussion of "postmodern" architecture in the sense in which the term was used in the late 1980s, namely, the introduction of historical substantive content and reference into architecture, disrupting the supposedly ahistorical purity of modernist architecture. Argues that postmodern use of history is really another version of the modern distance from history.

The Weimar-Republic, and the modernist architecture and planning that was born there, is still a contested place, from whence liberals, reactionaries and Marxists can all trace their lineage. Sabine Hake’s Topographies of Class attempts to clarify this contestation, through an interdisciplinary study of the modernist geography of the interwar-capital, Berlin. The book offers many new insights into the Weimar-era city, countering a tendency on the Left to reject the twentieth-century city in favour of the romanticised ‘capitals of (...) the nineteenth century’, with their insurgent proletariat and their lushly ornamented boulevards. Topographies of Class is a reminder that, irrespective of the era’s rejection of ornament and romanticism, it was a site of class-struggle as intense as that of the Paris of the 1870s. However, Hake’s study is dominated by a conception of class as an ‘identity’, akin to the identity-politics of race or gender, leading to an argument centred on the suppression or expression of ‘class-difference’ rather than class-struggle. In the process, her reading of the city’s modernism becomes overly one-sided, as a period of tension between labour and capital is read, under the influence of Manfredo Tafuri and Italian post-Marxist architectural theory, as being governed almost solely by the logic of Fordist capital. (shrink)

Introduction to the Special Issue: A Matter of Interactions—Religion and Architectural Modernism, 1945–70.

Architectural Drawings as Investigating Devices explores how the changing modes of representation in architecture and urbanism relate to the transformation of how the addressees of architecture and urbanism are conceived. The book diagnoses the dominant epistemological debates in architecture and urbanism during the 20th and 21st centuries. It traces their transformations, paying special attention to Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s preference for perspective representation, to the diagrams of Team 10 architects, to the critiques of (...) functionalism, and the upgrade of the artefactual value of architectural drawings in Aldo Rossi, John Hejduk, Peter Eisenman, and Oswald Mathias Ungers, and, finally, to the reinvention of architectural programme through the event in Bernard Tschumi and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Particular emphasis is placed on the spirit of truth and clarity in modernist architecture, the relationship between the individual and the community in post-war era architecture, the decodification of design process as syntactic analogy and the paradigm of autonomy in the 1970s and 1980s architecture, the concern about the dynamic character of urban conditions and the potentialities hidden in architectural programme in the post-autonomy era. This book is based on extensive archival research in Canada, the USA and Europe, and will be of interest to architects, artists, researchers and students in architecture, architectural history, theory, cultural theory, philosophy and aesthetics. (shrink)

Even today, apologists for modernist and post-modernist architecture frequently appeal to what, following Sir Karl Popper, I will call historicist arguments. Such arguments have a particular poignancy when they are used to justify the replacement of some familiar part of an ancient city with some intentionally untraditional structure; as, for example, when a familiar nineteenth century block of offices in a prime city site is swept away to make room for something supposedly more fitting to the ‘new (...) millennium’, a ‘twentieth century contribution to monumental architecture’, a building ‘of substantial importance to the present age’. Similarly, those architects or consumers of architecture who fail to conform to whatever stylistic demands the age is held to demand are marginalized in many supposedly serious discussions of architecture, and made to feel out of place and out of time. (shrink)

In the 1920s, London was a city on the cusp of change. Just as dance halls and jazz-age decadence displaced wartime austerity, a new generation of artists and designers sought to enliven the city's architecture, erecting dazzling buildings in the emerging art deco style. In contrast with the aging Victorian structures that dotted the city, these bright and colorful buildings--from the Hoover factory to the Ideal House by Raymond Hood, who later designed New York's Rockefeller Center--communicated the city's aspirations (...) as a thriving, modern metropolis. In the decades since, London's art deco buildings have lost none of their appeal. Millions of visitors gaze up at the headquarters of the Daily Telegraph and the nearby Daily Express, take in the elegance of Eltham Palace, or sip a martini at the Savoy. The city's most popular art deco attraction, however, is the London Underground, which boasts a series of art deco and modernist stations, designed throughout the 1920s and '30s by noted architect Charles Holden. In Modernism London Style, architectural historian Christoph Rauhut, with the help of three hundred photographs by Niels Lehmann, captures the architectural art deco heritage of London in a thrilling photographic tour. A portrait of the city during the interwar years, it chronicles the creativity of the artists and designers of the period--and the currents in the city's culture that helped shape their work. Insightful essays and an introduction by architecture scholar Adam Caruso shed light on some of the key features that characterize art deco, from floral and animal motifs to Egyptian themes. For readers planning a trip to London and hoping to place these striking buildings, the book also includes a detailed register and maps. (shrink)

Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture revolutionized the understanding of modernism in architecture, pushing back the sense of its origin from the early twentieth century to the 1750s and thus placing architectural thought within the a broader context of Western intellectual history. This new edition of Peter Collins's ground-breaking study includes all seventy-two illustrations of the original hard cover edition, which has been out of print since 1967, and restores the large format.

In this interview, Paul Virilio talks at length about his life and numerous published works ranging from Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology to the recently translated Polar Inertia. Considering important theoretical themes and questions relating to post- and 'hyper'- modernism, poststructuralism, modernity and postmodernity, Virilio discusses his often controversial views on the cultural writings of Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and Baudrillard. In so doing, Virilio not only clarifies many of his architectural, political and cultural concepts such as 'military space', (...) 'dromology' and the 'integral accident' but also provides much food for thought for all those presently concerned with the social implications of the 'disappearance' of aesthetics, technoculture, information warfare, cloning and 'cyberfeminism'. (shrink)

The article is dedicated to Ukrainian Art Nouveau architecture, which became a unique phenomenon in the development of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century architecture. Along with the reality that architecture in Ukraine evolved as a component of the European artistic movement, a distinctive architectural style was formed, based on the development of the traditions of folk architecture and ornamentation. This style produced much innovation in the shaping, decor, and ornamentation of buildings. Significant contributions to the development (...) of architectural modernism in Ukraine were made by Opanas Slastion, Vasyl Krychevskyi, Yevhen Serdiuk, Oleksandr Verbytskyi, Serhii Tymoshenko, Oleksandr Lushpynskyi, Ivan Levynskyi, Dmytro Diachenko, and others. Ukrainian Art Nouveau architecture was represented by five main architectural styles: modernist, folkloric, rationalist, neo-baroque, and Vienna Secession. Due to an attainment of the possibilities embodied in the constructions, developed techniques, and in the design of interior space and external features — such as walls, roofs, doors and windows, columns and balustrades — this style formed its own expressive system, which included a significant number of socially significant types of buildings. The styles of Ukrainian architectural modernism have not exhausted their potential and may yet have a continuation in contemporary architecture and that of the future. (shrink)

Photographic Architecture and the Spread of German Modernism is a “picture anthropology” of modern architecture, showing how photography shaped its development, its reception, and its history in the 20th c. At first, architects used photography to promote their practices, even as they doubted its value and efficacy as a means of representation. Unlike other representations, photographs were both too real, and not real enough. Furthermore, the photographic image acted on its subject like an alchemical agent. Photography altered the (...) material that it represented, at the same time shepherding architecture from elite social representation in the nineteenth century to potential mass communicator in the twentieth. In architectural markets, technological development and public self-presentation were at least equally important, and both were affected by photography and the mass distribution of cultural information. The collateral effects of market competition in architecture in the age of printed advertising, however, produced resistance in the architectural profession, as it insisted on the inadequacy of the new medium to adequately represent built things. The book focuses on two interconnected subjects subsumed in the term, “photographic architecture”: on the one hand, architectural photography and its circulation; on the other, the impact of photography on architectural design. In this particular strain of modern architecture, the visible appearance of buildings and the modalities of photographic images overlapped in consequential ways. This book analyzes the formation and impact of such ideas and the discourses that accompanied them. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss Otto Neurath’s philosophy in the context of Vienna Circle modernism. Following recent scholarship, the discussion considers as a starting point Neurath’s participation at the fourth International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM IV). However, the image of Neurath’s modernism that results from this perspective is incomplete because it tends to overlook the importance of scientific utopianism in Neurath’s thought. Scientific utopianism is a methodology proposed by Neurath for the social sciences in technological contexts, in which (...) scientists elaborate and develop plans (utopias) for the transformation of society, thus contributing to an informed societal debate. Decisions are nevertheless kept outside the domain of scientific activity. I claim that recognizing the centrality of scientific utopianism in Neurath’s philosophy is fundamental to understand Neurath’s modernism. This interpretation highlights the affinities of Neurath’s philosophy of the social sciences with the modern utopianism of H. G. Wells. Both authors consider that there can be no ultimate solution to social problems but that a plural and constant debate of proposals is fundamental for the improvement of society. Therefore, Neurath’s modernism connects his philosophy of science to the literary utopian tradition. (shrink)

One of the important modernist terms – flexibility – offers the introduction of time and of the unknown as parameters in design. Yet the development of flexibility in modern architecture shows also the ambivalent relationship between architecture and the user – the objective of incorporating flexibility in archi-tecture. The span between introducing the freedom of choice and expression and the reality of totally controlled spaces and movements shows the range of interpretations of this subject. By looking at (...) the strategies and evolution of flexibility in architecture one can project possible problems and frictions for the new discipline – ubiquitous computing. Both flexible architecture and the ubiquitous house are devoted to space, time and technology, and intend to give the user the maximum of possibilities inside the house. What are the mistakes that some of the development in flexible architecture has made, that ubiquitous computing might learn from, especially in its relation to the user? (shrink)

The book explores two radical changes of cultural and social paradigm that determined the World after 1945 - Modernism and Postmodernism. From the cataclysmic atmosphere emerged the second wave of Modernism. In art this attitude was manifested in the form of a radical break with the aesthetic and stylistic characteristics of prior generations. In architecture the International Style was born, meanwhile similar "universality" was also a characteristic of musical serialism. From the beginning of the 1970s the wheels again began (...) to turn in the other direction. The powerful destructive will of modernism increasingly waivered, and the period after modernism - postmodernism - began. The book answers questions related to the reasons for these turnarounds, their consequences and their implications. (shrink)

In trying to say what modernism is , we must remind ourselves that it cannot and must not—to be properly described and understood—be confined only to the arts of music, literature, painting, sculpture, theater, architecture, those arts with which we normally associate the term “culture.” Modernism can be said to embrace, in the broadest terms, not only the arts of Western culture but also science, technology, the family, marriage, sexuality, economics, the politics of democracy, the politics of authoritarianism, the (...) politics of totalitarianism, and such academic disciplines as philosophy and the social sciences of sociology and anthropology . Its influence and effects have been all-pervasive. No corner of twentieth-century life has escaped its profound alteration of both the individual and society. It has radicalized all levels of human existence.What, then, is modernism?Some have described it as a state of “chronic revolution,” that is, revolution against the past, against tradition, against history itself. Others have pointed to its voracious appetite for innovation, for the search for the “new,” for the hunger to be “original”—to be the first and last with something unique and difference, whatever that something might be or in whatever area of human endeavor it might arise.Still others have characterized modernism as the application to all realms of human life of forms of structural rationalization, that is, finding rationally structured ways of being and doing regardless of consequences and, more especially, rationalizing away the mysteries and questions which have to do with meaning, that is, morality and ethics—those areas that lie outside the purely rational. And still others have viewed modernism as a condition of freedom within which the individual can be himself, unfettered and uninhibited, released from the drag of superego and conscience, a separate entity of being, unanswerable to others whether in the form of individuals or society as a whole.Last but not least, there are those who continue to see modernism as a self-perpetuating form of avant-gardism, always at the point of the interface between the present and the future, always ready to move on to the next stage because living itself is a process of constant change, constant motion, perpetual transformation. George Rochberg is the composer of a large body of musical works and the author of a recently published collection of essays, The Aesthetics of Survival, A Composer’s View of Twentieth-Century Music. He is currently writing his fifth symphony, on a commission from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In 1983 he retired from the University of Pennsylvania as Emeritus Annenberg Professor of the Humanities. (shrink)

Kolb discusses postmodern architectural styles and theories within the context of philosophical ideas about modernism and postmodernism. He focuses on what it means to dwell in a world and within a history and to act from or against a tradition.

The author suggests to view the architectural planning of the human environment as „directing” the phenomena and events that occur in human surroundings. In her reflections on human existence she juxtaposes the concepts “environment” and “space”, which both accentuate different aspects of the human environment. The author views “environment” as the objective existence of human surroundings, and “space” as the effect of environmental envisionment and experiencing the environment by means of rationality and valuation.The author also focuses on interactions between the (...) paradigm of thought and the paradigm of the order which humans bring into the space they design, and describes related examples. She notes that the links between architecture and the “how” and “what” of our thinking are visible not only in accounts of bygone eras, but also in the influence on architecture of two contemporary thought trends—post-modernism and ecologism. She goes on to suggest that ecological architecture should be understood as spatial design patterned on the structure of eco-systems. Thus understood, ecological architecture is neither structuralistic, nor “atomic”, nor collectivistic. The author also sees the difference between post-modern and ecological architecture in the ability of making use of the opportunities provided by difference. (shrink)

A collection of essays which reevaluates the significant connections between the disciplines of music, fine art and architecture in the period covering the emergence and flowering of modernism, c. 1849-1950.

Even today, apologists for modernist and post-modernist architecture frequently appeal to what, following Sir Karl Popper, I will call historicist arguments. Such arguments have a particular poignancy when they are used to justify the replacement of some familiar part of an ancient city with some intentionally untraditional structure; as, for example, when a familiar nineteenth century block of offices in a prime city site is swept away to make room for something supposedly more fitting to the ‘new (...) millennium’, a ‘twentieth century contribution to monumental architecture’, a building ‘of substantial importance to the present age’. Similarly, those architects or consumers of architecture who fail to conform to whatever stylistic demands the age is held to demand are marginalized in many supposedly serious discussions of architecture, and made to feel out of place and out of time. (shrink)

Alongside his work as a practising architect, Sigurd Frosterus (1876–1956) was one of Finland’s leading architectural critics during the first decades of the 20th century. In his early life, Frosterus was a strict rationalist who wanted to develop architecture towards scientific ideals instead of historical, archaeological, or mythological approaches. According to him, an architect had to analyse his tasks of construction in order to be able to logically justify his solutions, and he must take advantage of the possibilities of (...) the latest technology. The particular challenge of his time was reinforced concrete. Frosterus considered that the buildings of a modern metropolis should be constructivist in expressing their purpose and technology honestly. The impulses of two famous European architects – Otto Wagner and Henry van de Velde – had a life-long influence on his work. Urban architecture with long street perspectives and houses with austere façades and unified eaves lines was the stylistic ideal that he shared with the Austrian architect Wagner. An open and enlightened urban experience was Frosterus’s future vision, not National Romantic capriciousness or intimacy drawing from the Middle Ages. According to Frosterus, the Belgian van de Velde was the master interior architect of the epoch, the interior of the Nietzsche Archives in Weimar being an excellent example of his work. However, already in the 1910s Frosterus’s rationalism developed towards a broader understanding of the functions of the façades of business edifices. In his brilliant analyses of the business palaces by the Finnish architects Armas Lindgren and Lars Sonck, he considered the symbolic and artistic values of the façades to be even more important than technological honesty. Moreover, references to the history of architecture had a crucial role in the 1920s and 1930s when he wrote about his main work– the Stockmann department store in the centre of Helsinki.  . (shrink)

Post-modernism is receiving much attention, but it is often seen as merely an extrapolation of modernism. Michael Polanyi’s post-critical epistemology offers a useful way of understanding post-modernism. The modern objectivism of critical thought leads to a dead-end dehumanization. Polanyi offers a recovery of the human dimension by demonstrating the ways in which all knowing, especially scientific discovery, requires human participation. An analogy is drawn with post-modern art and architecture, which similarly attempt to recover the human form and traditional or (...) classical ornamentation in a way which goes beyond the sterile abstractness of modernism. (shrink)

While the Vienna Circle had virtually no impact on the Czech-speaking philosophical community during the 1930s, one can find a curious meeting point in the field of theory of architecture. There is now a growing literature on Otto Neurath as a theorist of architecture and urbanism, who emphasized the social aspects of modern building and approached architecture from his idiosyncratic viewpoint of Marxism interpreted as a physicalistic social science. It is less well known that a young Czech (...) architecture critic and theorist, Karel Teige, cultivated strikingly similar views during the same period—from 1920s to 1930s—albeit without any knowledge of Neurath’s thought in particular, or for that matter the Vienna Circle in general. The chapter reveals similarities as well as differences between Neurath and Teige on Marxism, science and architecture, and the Bauhaus, as well as a discussion of the relations of both to the contemporaries, most importantly Adolf Loos, Josef Frank and Hannes Meyer. (shrink)

This article analyzes the formative role of medieval theology and aesthetics in the development of postwar American architecture by focusing on the architectural theory and practice of Mies van der Rohe and Jean Labatut, both of whom became actively interested in Neo-Thomism from the late 1940s. More specifically, a closer look at their reliance on the work of Jacques Maritain, the preeminent promotor of Neo-Thomism, sheds light on the transmission and circulation of old and new concepts within twentieth-century architectural (...) theory. By revealing how Maritain’s ideas helped to codify the latter and thus exposed the premodern ideas at the heart of modern architecture, I argue that modernist aesthetics should be re-evaluated with regards to its definition of “the new” and its emphasis on the breakdown or mutation of premodern frames of reference. (shrink)

This book brings to light central topics that are neglected in current histories and theories of architecture and urbanism. It traces two models for the practice of architecture. One follows the ancient model in which the architect renders his service to serve the interests of others; it survives and is dominant in modernism. The other, first formulated in the fifteenth century by Leon Battista Alberti, has the architect use his talent in coordination with others to contribute to the (...) common good of a republican civil order that seeks to protect its own liberty and that of its citizens. It stresses the importance and urgency, of restoring traditional practices so that we can build just, beautiful, and sustainable cities and rural districts. (shrink)

Adorno wrote prolifically about modernism in culture and the arts, but little has been written about whether or in what form he might have addressed architectural concerns. The project of exploring this potentially fruitful intersection has been helped in the last couple of decades by authors from philosophy and critical theory contrasting his ideas about dwelling with Heidegger’s and by architectural theorists considering the import of his aesthetic theory.1 If these fall shy of the more immediate connections to architecture (...) that some have hoped to uncover, this is because Adorno almost never wrote about specific buildings and their designers. Neither did he publish any texts dedicated exclusively to architecture or dwelling, which is not to say that he never wrote about them or that architectural concerns are absent from his work. Adorno’s writings on dwelling and architecture live here and there, emerging and then moving on to surface later, if not often as direct commentary then as a kind of architectural gaze his thinking sometimes employs. Dwelling and architecture exist like exiles in his writings even though the question of dwelling—of what it means to inhabit social and space-time worlds as embodied beings—lies as much at the core of Adorno’s philosophy as it did in Heidegger’s. (shrink)

Multiple definitions of Modernism have been put forward, often focusing on the character or features of the works of art and literature produced within this cultural movement. Here I want to focus, instead, on the sensibility of Modernism as this has manifested itself to be especially concerned not with the content of representation, but with the materials out of which a representation is made. Through an analysis of eighteenth-century English portraiture, nineteenth-century French political painting, and up to twentieth-century Modernist (...) painting, I will show how one ceases to see the representational content through the materials and technique, and how we begin to see it depicted in them. I will furthermore examine some cases showing the progression into Modernism in those arts, and then consider the parallel movement in philosophy. Each, as we will see, casts important light on the other, and in the end, something essential to the Modernist achievement will emerge in high relief: just as paint and visible, attention-capturing brushstroke is constitutive of the content of modernist painting, and just as steel and glass and the purity of visible, exposed design is constitutive of architecture, so language is constitutive of us and a distinctively modern form of self-understanding. In this context we will see more of the significance of Wittgenstein’s claim that language itself is the vehicle of thought. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein was deeply embedded in Viennese architectural Modernism, culturally as well as personally. His assimilation in recent historiography to existing trends within the local architectural movement—namely Loos—are based on aesthetic and intellectual simplifications. The simplifications eclipse the distinctive contribution Wittgenstein’s Palais Stonborough makes to architecture, to Viennese Modernism, and perhaps to philosophy. The present paper seeks to rectify this constellation by re-situating Wittgenstein as an architect in his own right by re-sensitizing us to the idiosyncrasy of Wittgenstein’s (...) class='Hi'>architecture. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage étudie dans sa première partie des formes diverses d'écriture, de la critique d'art au récit en passant par la poésie et le manifeste. Leurs auteurs, de Beckett à Michaux et de Paz à Tzara, ont été liés aux avant-gardes de la première moitié du vingtième siècle (en particulier à dada et au surréalisme) tout en empruntant une voie originale. Il aborde ensuite dans sa seconde partie les rapports de peintres comme Magritte et Léger à l'architecture. En outre, (...) il analyse le problème culturel de la collection d'art et du musée posé par des figures historiques de l'avant-garde comme Duchamp et Broodthaers. (shrink)

Marianna Charitonidou's books discuss the problem of changes in the creation of architecture in the 20th century. The author showed representatives of four generations of architects of this period. The first group is represented by Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The second generation was described as a group of opponents to the CIAM environment centered around the Team X grouping and the activities of Alison and Peter Smithson and Aldo van Eyck. Generation three was discussed based (...) on the work of Aldo Rossi and Giancarlo Da Carlo. Generation four, active since the 1980s, was linked to the activities of Rem Koolhaas and Bernard Tschumi. (shrink)

Using theories by Pierre Bourdieu and the Frankfurt School that causally link art to class interests, this article examines the differential development of modern architecture in the United States and central Europe during the early 20th century. Modern architecture was the aesthetic expression of technocracy, a movement of the new class of professionals, managers and engineers to place itself at the center of rationalized capitalism. The aesthetic of modernism, which glorified technology and instrumental reason, was weak and undeveloped (...) in the US, because this class defined by its cultural capital was quickly integrated into modernizing corporations, where it was compelled to cater to the emerging mass market and drop its distinctive aesthetic. Modern architecture emerged mainly in interwar central Europe, because here industrial modernization was blocked, forcing the new class to pursue an alliance with state managers pushing modernization. Thus unencumbered by the demands of the mass market, modern architects were free to express their machine aesthetic in state-financed housing projects. (shrink)

This article discusses the design methodology of the Benedictine monk-architect Dom Hans van der Laan, famous for his manifesto De Architectonische Ruimte, in which he proposed his ideal elementary architecture. In the past, this ideal achitecture was linked to Van der Laan’s proportional system and to his general approach as an architect rather than to his Catholic background. Consequently, the changing conceptual landscape in which he developed his ideas on the relation between religion and design was neglected. Yet, as (...) this article will argue, it is only by carefully exploring the relation between Van der Laan’s attempts to define a fundamental architecture and his ambition to understand the religious traditions they may have sprung from that one can understand how his religion and design methodology influenced each other. Based on unedited primary sources, this article reveals forgotten interconnections between Van der Laan’s religious and architectural thinking. By analysing these motifs, it offers new insights on the interrelationships between religion and architecture that go beyond the traditionalist-modernist dichotomy. (shrink)

Aureli advances a fresh, spirited and combative account of the idea of ‘autonomy’, connecting Italian architectural debates from the 1960s with the politics of class-autonomy that was being developed and advanced by workerist theorists such as Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti and Toni Negri. Aureli’s account focuses on Aldo Rossi’s architectural ideas and the project of the No-Stop City proposed by the young avant-garde group Archizoom. The Project of Autonomy is not simply envisaged as an historical exploration of the 1960s; primarily, (...) it is conceived as an intervention in current architectural theory, drawing on the author’s interest in Tronti’s politics to challenge the contemporary popularity of a broadly post-Negrian ‘autonomism’. This review questions aspects of Aureli’s reading of Rossi and Manfredo Tafuri. Furthermore, although Aureli’s discussion of Red Vienna opens up onto vital questions of strategies for social change, which remain pertinent to contemporary arguments over ‘enclaves’ or ‘zones’ of resistance, his antagonism towards Tafuri prevents his argument from either exploring or advancing the debate which he has initiated. (shrink)

“Else-where” is a synoptic survey of the representational values given to art, architecture, and cultural production from 2002 through 2011. Written primarily as a critique of what is suppressed in architecture and what is disclosed in art, the essays are informed by the passage out of post-structuralism and its disciplinary analogues toward the real Real . While architecture nominally addresses an environmental ethos, it also famously negotiates its own representational values by way of its putative autonomy ; (...) its main repression in this regard is “landscape,” figure of the Other and figure of the Real. Engaging forms of spectrality, and not necessarily speculative intelligence per se, architecture is also “conscious” of its own complicity in capitalist orders, a complicity that in part underwrites its avant-garde forms of agitation since the onset of modern architecture. As a result, and over the course of the twentieth century, architectural vanguards have successively been depleted such that they return only as reified half-measures in the late-modern production of difference. As such, the essay “Actually Existing Ground” examines the failed promise of Landscape Urbanism. Since the 1960s, as with the allied arts, architecture has evacuated many of the utopian gestures given to modernism and embraced a form of ultra-contingency in a direct alliance with the post-modern and post-Marxist concession to markets and to cultural production as principal means of establishing formal hegemony. This recourse or surrender to the economic-determinist ethos of post-modernity, regardless of attempts to problematize it and/or critique it through types of what Manfredo Tafuri has called “operative criticism” , has, arguably, all but failed, and with the suggestive return circa 2011 of new forms of resistance an exit from the accommodating spirit of the times is indicative of the expectation of strenuous, yet highly formal and non-discursive operations within artistic and architectural production. The essays collected in “Else-where” cross various disciplines, inclusive of landscape architecture, architecture, and visual art, to develop a nuanced critique of an emergent formal regard in the arts that is also an invocation of the highest coordinates given to the arts – formal ontology as speculative intelligence itself – or the return of the universal as utopian thought “here-and-now.”. (shrink)

If the historian has difficulty assessing events in the past, matters are worse for the contemporary critic who attempts to explore events which are still unfolding. Thus, it is not surprising that contemporary discourse about Post Modernism in architecture does not lend itself to a neat taxonomy, not least because the participants sometimes term themselves Post Modernists, and other times reject that label. It is possible, however, to distinguish between stylistic Post Modernism and theoretical Post Modernism. Stylistic Post Modernism (...) is that of the popular press — an architecture characterized by a departure from the stylistic canons of the Modern Movement. Its leading practitioners claim that the architecture of Modernism eschewed ornament, emphasized the expressive potential of functionalism only, and denied both history and the human element in architecture. (shrink)