Chinese Brutalism Today' is divided into three chapters and ends with a methodological afterword that explains the reasons why the research was carried out and the scientific tools used. The first chapter is "Exposed concrete in the design process," the second is "Identity Research: Towards an Ornate Surface" and the third is "Global ambition: towards a polished surface." The narration takes place through a substantial written part accompanied by specific images that facilitate the understanding of the text. Transversally, in the narrative, an interpretation is given to the precise and ambiguous dictates announced in 2017 by President Xi Jinping: to pursue a contemporary architecture made of "international standards with Chinese characteristics."
Often problematically labeled as “Brutalist” architecture, the concrete buildings that transformed Boston during 1960s and 1970s were conceived with progressive-minded intentions by some of the world’s most influential designers, including Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier, I. M. Pei, Henry Cobb, Araldo Cossutta, Gerhard Kallmann and Michael McKinnell, Paul Rudolph, Josep Lluís Sert, and The Architects Collaborative. As a worldwide phenomenon, building with concrete represents one of the major architectural movements of the postwar years, but in Boston it was deployed in more numerous and diverse civic, cultural, and academic projects than in any other major U.S. city. After decades of stagnation and corrupt leadership, public investment in Boston in the 1960s catalyzed enormous growth, resulting in a generation of bold buildings that shared a vocabulary of concrete modernism. The period from the 1960 arrival of Edward J. Logue as the powerful and often controversial director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority to the reopening of Quincy Market in 1976 saw Boston as an urban laboratory for the exploration of concrete’s structural and sculptural qualities. What emerged was a vision for the city’s widespread revitalization often referred to as the “New Boston.” Today, when concrete buildings across the nation are in danger of insensitive renovation or demolition, Heroic presents the concrete structures that defined Boston during this remarkable period—from the well-known (Boston City Hall, New England Aquarium, and cornerstones of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University) to the already lost (Mary Otis Stevens and Thomas F. McNulty’s concrete Lincoln House and Studio; Sert, Jackson & Associates’ Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School)—with hundreds of images; essays by architectural historians Joan Ockman, Lizabeth Cohen, Keith N. Morgan, and Douglass Shand-Tucci; and interviews with a number of the architects themselves. The product of 8 years of research and advocacy, Heroic surveys the intentions and aspirations of this period and considers anew its legacies—both troubled and inspired.
A curated collection of some of the most powerful and awe-inspiring Brutalist architecture ever built This Brutal World is a global survey of this compelling and much-admired style of architecture. It brings to light virtually unknown Brutalist architectural treasures from across the former eastern bloc and other far flung parts of the world. It includes works by some of the best contemporary architects including Zaha Hadid and David Chipperfield as well as by some of the master architects of the 20th century including Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn, Paul Rudolph and Marcel Breuer.
Jeffrey Tucker is well known as the author of many informative and beloved articles and books on the subject of human freedom. Now he’s turned his attention to the most shocking and widespread violation of human freedom in our times: the authoritarian lockdown of society on the pretense that it is necessary in the face of a novel virus. Learning from the experts, Jeffrey Tucker has researched this subject from every angle. In this book, Tucker lays out the history, politics, economics, and science relevant to the coronavirus response. The result is clear: there is no justification for the lockdowns. It’s liberty or lockdown. We have to choose. The book includes a foreword by George Gilder.
In this bold, provocative collection, Wang Hui confronts some of the major issues concerning modern China and the status quo of contemporary Chinese thought. The book’s overarching theme is the possibility of an alternative modernity that does not rely on imported conceptions of Chinese history and its legacy. Wang Hui argues that current models, based largely on Western notions of empire and the nation-state, fail to account for the richness and diversity of pre-modern Chinese historical practice. At the same time, he refrains from offering an exclusively Chinese perspective and placing China in an intellectual ghetto. Navigating terrain on regional language and politics, he draws on China’s unique past to expose the inadequacies of European-born standards for assessing modern China’s evolution. He takes issue particularly with the way in which nation-state logic has dominated politically charged concerns like Chinese language standardization and “The Tibetan Question.” His stance is critical—and often controversial—but he locates hope in the kinds of complex, multifaceted arrangements that defined China and much of Asia for centuries. The Politics of Imagining Asia challenges us not only to re-examine our theories of “Asia” but to reconsider what “Europe” means as well. As Theodore Huters writes in his introduction, “Wang Hui’s concerns extend beyond China and Asia to an ambition to rethink world history as a whole.”
The concluding volume--following Mao's Great Famine and The Tragedy of Liberation--in Frank Dikötter's award-winning trilogy chronicling the Communist revolution in China. After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives from 1958–1962, an aging Mao Zedong launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The Cultural Revolution's goal was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalistic elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. Young students formed the Red Guards, vowing to defend the Chairman to the death, but soon rival factions started fighting each other in the streets with semiautomatic weapons in the name of revolutionary purity. As the country descended into chaos, the military intervened, turning China into a garrison state marked by bloody purges that crushed as many as one in fifty people. The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962–1976 draws for the first time on hundreds of previously classified party documents, from secret police reports to unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches. After the army itself fell victim to the Cultural Revolution, ordinary people used the political chaos to resurrect the market and hollow out the party's ideology. By showing how economic reform from below was an unintended consequence of a decade of violent purges and entrenched fear, The Cultural Revolution casts China's most tumultuous era in a wholly new light.
Equally admired and maligned for his remarkable Brutalist buildings, Paul Rudolph (1918–1997) shaped both late modernist architecture and a generation of architects while chairing Yale’s department of architecture from 1958 to 1965. Based on extensive archival research and unpublished materials, The ArchitectureofPaul Rudolph is the first in-depth study of the architect, neglected since his postwar zenith. Author Timothy M. Rohan unearths the ideas that informed Rudolph’s architecture, from his Florida beach houses of the 1940s to his concrete buildings of the 1960s to his lesser-known East Asian skyscrapers of the 1990s. Situating Rudolph within the architectural discourse of his day, Rohan shows how Rudolph countered the perceived monotony of mid-century modernism with a dramatically expressive architecture for postwar America, exemplified by his Yale Art and Architecture Building of 1963, famously clad in corrugated concrete. The fascinating story of Rudolph’s spectacular rise and fall considerably deepens longstanding conceptions about postwar architecture: Rudolph emerges as a pivotal figure who anticipated new directions for architecture, ranging from postmodernism to sustainability.
This nuanced portrait of Gordon Bunshaft and his work for the architecture firm SOM explores his role in defining the built aesthetic of corporate America.
China accounts for only 1 per cent of the world's total architects, but produces 10 per cent of the world's buildings and uses 33 per cent of the world's reinforced concrete. How does this condition affect architecture? Translated for the first time into English, The Condition of Chinese Architecture is the result of a five-year immersive investigation by TCA Think Tank into this paradigm. The research presented in this publication provides an insider's perspective to decode what is occurring in the midst of Asia's most recent construction boom, the extent of its global impact and the circumstances in which its actors must operate. This book rejects the standard approaches to studying this condition, in which sweeping conclusions are cast from big data and a fetishisation of statistics including the growth, size and quantity of projects; the speed of their production and demolition; and the relationship between a project and its context (or, in many cases, its non-context). Instead, Pier Alessio Rizzardi and Zhang Hankun trace a line from the significance of building culture in Chinese history and identity, dissecting how the longstanding influence of Western movements from Baroque to Soviet architecture, megastructural modernism and the latest generation of avant-garde and post-critical 'global' movements meld together to form this current state. In addition to interviewing key voices of contemporary Chinese architecture--including such icons as Chang Yong Ho, Liu Jiakun, Ma Yansong, Liu Xiaodu, LU Wenyu, Zhang Ke, Li Xiaodong, Li Hu, Chen Yifeng, Zhu Pei, Zhang Lei, Qi Xin, Rocco Yim, Zhang Bin, Liu Yuyang and Xu Tiantian--the authors weave together the entire spectrum of individuals involved in this condition, from construction workers to developers, curators, critics and artists. The result is a groundbreaking, cumulative reckoning of the history and future of Chinese architecture that is teased out through layers of personal accounts and crossdisciplinary research drawing on architectural history, design and aesthetics, technology, philosophy, politics and society.
From luxury apartment towers to offices, places of worship to museums, brutalist architecture is having a 21st-century moment— and this book is here to explore the new interpretations of the style. Designed with the same bold aesthetic that informed Le Corbusier himself, this book features fifty recent examples of how architects around the world are embracing the principles of brutalism — simplicity, functionality, and rawness — reimagining them for today’s standards and tastes. Drawing from the radical approach of the controversial architectural movement, today’s Brutalist buildings are both sophisticated and elegant. As the hundreds of exterior and interior photos in this book reveal, architects have taken advantage of new technology to make concrete-based structures that are refined and alluring, as well as stylish and modish unlike their predecessors. Each chapter is dedicated to a different type of building and is introduced with a selection of iconic structures as an essential visual reference for Brutalism’s new look. In some instances the overall strength of the aesthetic is paired with equally forceful materials such as glass, metal and brick; other examples show how classically brutalist lines are integrated into generously proportioned, light-filled spaces. An informative celebration of Brutalist architecture’s legacy, this book is an exciting exploration of how today’s most innovative architects are discovering the inherent beauty of powerful concrete volumes that was at the heart of Le Corbusier’s original vision.
