The Modern movement began in the 1920s when a small group of young architects felt all that had gone before should be rejected and that architectural design should start afresh. This fresh start, they declared, should be based on modern technology and a new, modern approach to life. Their innovations became the 20th century's dominant movement in architecture, crystallizing into the international style of the 1920s and '30s. In "Exploding the Myths of Modern Architecture, " Malcolm Millais explores the forces and factors that led to the emergence of the Modern movement, arguing that it was based on completely false premises. Millais offers a rarely heard perspective on the Modern movement, explaining its failures and how the well-meaning "revolutionaries" behind it gained and maintained power.
In Making Dystopia, distinguished architectural historian James Stevens Curl tells the story of the advent of architectural Modernism in the aftermath of the First World War, its protagonists, and its astonishing, almost global acceptance after 1945. He argues forcefully that the triumph of architectural Modernism in the second half of the twentieth century led to massive destruction, the creation of alien urban landscapes, and a huge waste of resources. Moreover, the coming of Modernism was not an inevitable, seamless evolution, as many have insisted, but a massive, unparalled disruption that demanded a clean slate and the elimination of all ornament, decoration, and choice. Tracing the effects of the Modernist revolution in architecture to the present, Stevens Curl argues that, with each passing year, so-called 'iconic' architecture by supposed 'star' architects has become more and more bizarre, unsettling, and expensive, ignoring established contexts and proving to be stratospherically remote from the aspirations and needs of humanity. In the elite world of contemporary architecture, form increasingly follows finance, and in a society in which the 'haves' have more and more, and the 'have-nots' are ever more marginalized, he warns that contemporary architecture continues to stack up huge potential problems for the future, as housing costs spiral out of control, resources are squandered on architectural bling, and society fractures. This courageous, passionate, deeply researched, and profoundly argued book should be read by everyone concerned with what is around us. Its combative critique of the entire Modernist architectural project and its apologists will be highly controversial to many. But it contains salutary warnings that we ignore at our peril. And it asks awkward questions to which answers are long overdue.
This is not a book for architects, but for all those that have suffered, consciously and unconsciously, from modern architecture and have wondered how it came about. This was largely due to one man, an architect called Le Corbusier. For some he was a genius, but the truth is he was a sham, a fake, a charlatan whose only gift was for self-publicity. He was the most influential architect of the second half of the twentieth century; his influence overwhelmed the architectural profession on a global scale, who swallowed his publicity whole, and still hold him in awe. For the rest of the world, the mere mortals, his influence was disastrous, as traditional buildings were destroyed and replaced by featureless boxes of varying sizes, imposing a dreariness hitherto unimagined. As usual, it was the poor who suffered most as they were herded into tower-blocks. These were often grouped into estates that ringed many towns and cities, which then degenerated into high-rise slums with all the well-known attendant social problems. This book exposes the myths that surround Le Corbusier, detailing the endless failures of his proposals and his projects. These were due to his profound dishonesty, both as a person and as an architect. His legacy was an architectural profession that believed, and still believe, they were designing buildings based on logic, functionality and honesty whereas they were doing the opposite.
This book orchestrates a convergence of two discourses from the 1960s—Nelson Goodman’s aesthetic theory on one side and critiques of modern architecture articulated by figures like Peter Blake, Charles Jencks, and Robert Venturi/Denise Scott Brown on the other. Grounded in Goodman’s aesthetic theory, the book explores his conceptual framework within the context of modern architecture. At the heart of the investigation lies Goodman’s concept of exemplification. While his notion of denotation pertains to representational elements, often ornaments, in architecture, exemplification accentuates specific formal properties at the expense of others, including color, spatial orientation, transparency, seriality, and the like. Supplemented by findings from phenomenology, the book traces these effects in buildings, notably those by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright—all key figures in the critiques of modern architecture. Employing Goodman’s framework, the book aims to address accusations of emptiness and alienation directed at modern architecture in the postwar era. It illustrates that modern architecture symbolizes aesthetically in a fundamentally different way than architecture from earlier periods. This book will be of interest to architects, artists, researchers, and students in architecture, architectural history, theory, cultural theory, philosophy, and aesthetics.
Philosophy exercises a massive influence on contemporary architectural culture and the understanding of the built environment. Discussions of architects and architectural academics are heavily loaded with theoretical ideas, concepts and views imported from the works of philosophers. At the same time this architectural employment of philosophy rarely goes beyond the tendency to mine philosophical works for ideas, words and phrases and use them, often without much understanding, in order to promote architectural agendas and embellish theoretical claims made by architects and academics. The book presents the history of this phenomenon for the past hundred years. It describes and analyzes numerous, often funny, entertaining as well as embarrassing, examples of false intellectual pretense and pompous but incompetent philosophical posturing by prominent architects and architectural academics of the era and their efforts to bamboozle readers, colleagues and the general public. The book presents a powerful criticism of modernist views on architecture and argues that the rise of obfuscation and philosophical posturing among architects and architectural academics is a defensive strategy intended to draw attention away from the failure of Modernism in architecture.
This volume is a passionate scholarly inquiry focused on some of the most pressing issues confronting contemporary architectural practice, urbanism, and city-making. Presented in the form of conversations with leading architects, urbanists, and internationally renowned architectural historians and urban thinkers, this concise book reviews and critiques the legacy of Modernism and its impact on global urbanisation. Timely, thoughtful and thought-provoking, these conversations, conducted by the editor during the last few years, urge the rejection of some of the most widespread dogmas and often dangerously limiting and misguided intellectual legacies of urban and architectural thinking. The contributors recommend a search instead for more enlightened architectural practices, urban planning, and city-making in the new millennium, when environmental problems have become particularly pressing. In this volume, readers will find not only glimpses into possible urban futures, but a thorough review of what now often appear as the shackles of the not-so-distant Modernist past.
The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.
This thoroughly updated edition of Angus J. Macdonald’s insightful book Structure and Architecture offers an in depth analysis of structural design and its relationship with architecture. It draws on clear explanations of the connections between structural form, structural performance and architectural design to explore the interface between the technical and the visual in architecture. Additional chapters in this new edition cover the fields of structural theory, structural philosophy, the contributions of prominent engineers to the evolution of Modern architecture, and the concept and practice of sustainable design. Fully illustrated, this critical appraisal of structures is a core-curriculum text for students of architecture, structural engineering and architectural history, and is also a valuable resource for practitioners of these disciplines.
The Cannibal's Cookbook fiercely consumes the body of past cyclopean constructions. It assembles, re-packages, and offers this latent knowledge for your contemporary consumption. It is a manual for the hungry, for those who are not satiated by the careless building practices of the present. With one foot in the past and another in the present, the cookbook bridges the realities of our ancestors and ourselves. We propose a series of architectural "recipes" after dining on this body of past expertise. The recipes are deciphered from ancient cyclopean masonry systems, but with a contemporary twist. They cannibalize leftover debris--building rubble that typically stuffs our landfills--to construct new buildings
