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Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture
by Sarah Williams Goldhagen (Editor) / Réjean Legault (Editor) / The MIT Press (Editor)

The two decades after the Second World War are typically viewed as an inchoate interregnum between an expiring modernism and an incipient post-modernism. Yet this tidy narrative tells only half the story, leaving out a second development, an evolving and powerful modernism. The essays here reveal that a wide range of postwar architects and theorists -- including Saarinen and Rudofsky in the United States; ATBAT-Afrique in Morocco; Price and the Smithsons in England; Bakema in Holland; and the Metabolists in Japan -- were determined to renew rather than abandon the legacy of modernism.

Presenting new research, these essays analyze an individual or movement that grappled with modernism in response to developments within and outside the architectural profession. They reveal a nexus of pre-occupations that dominated discourse of the postwar era, including authenticity, place, individual freedom, and popular culture. In addition, the introduction and coda discuss the critical themes of postwar architecture and propose a framework for conceptualizing architectural modernism and its evolution after the war. Together, the book's essays remap the emerging field of postwar architectural studies, refocusing attention on modernist ideas and work that have had a critical, ongoing impact on architectural culture.

Copublished with the Canadian Centre for Architecture

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Architecture and Disjunction
by Bernard Tschumi (Author) / The MIT Press (Editor)

Avant-garde theorist and architect Bernard Tschumi is equally well known for his writing and his practice. Architecture and Disjunction, which brings together Tschumi's essays from 1975 to 1990, is a lucid and provocative analysis of many of the key issues that have engaged architectural discourse over the past two decades -- from deconstructive theory to recent concerns with the notions of event and program.

The essays develop different themes in contemporary theory as they relate to the actual making of architecture, attempting to realign the discipline with a new world culture characterized by both discontinuity and heterogeneity. Included are a number of seminal essays that incited broad attention when they first appeared in magazines and journals, as well as more recent and topical texts.

Tschumi's discourse has always been considered radical and disturbing. He opposes modernist ideology and postmodern nostalgia since both impose restrictive criteria on what may be deemed "legitimate" cultural conditions. He argues for focusing on our immediate cultural situation, which is distinguished by a new postindustrial "unhomeliness" reflected in the ad hoc erection of buildings with multipurpose programs. The condition of New York and the chaos of Tokyo are thus perceived as legitimate urban forms.

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Architecture and Feminism (Yale Publications on Architecture)
by E. Danze (Author) / D. Coleman (Editor) / Princeton Architectural Press (Editor)

Over the last several decades, feminists and architects have independently developed critiques of modern Western assumptions and cultural practices. Architecture and Feminism addresses the intersection of these two seemingly disparate fields through a lively and diverse collection of essays and projects, including interdisciplinary investigations of literature, social history, home economics, and art history.

Articles examine such varied topics as Niki de Saint-Phalles exuberant building-sized female sculpture Hon, the aesthetics and politics of the Playboy bachelor pad, Edith Wharton's ideas on domestic architecture, and the Legend of Master Manole, a disquieting Eastern European folktale that prescribes the ritual entombment of women in the walls of buildings, while visual projects take well-known structures by Philip Johnson and Louis Sullivan as points of departure for a feminist reading of architectural history. Rather than presenting a single, didactic position, this collection offers a range of fresh voices to describe the cross-connections and shared concerns between architecture and feminism.

Contributors to Architecture and Feminism include Manuela Antoniu, Vanessa Chase, Deborah Fausch, Molly Hankwitz, Susan R. Henderson, Amy Landesberg, Lisa Quatrale, Christine S. E. Magar, Mary McLeod, and George Wagner.

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Architecture and Modernity: A Critique
by Hilde Heynen (Author) / The MIT Press (Editor)

In this exploration of the relationship between modernity, dwelling, and architecture, Hilde Heynen attempts to bridge the gap between the discourse of the modern movement and cultural theories of modernity. On one hand, she discusses architecture from the perspective of critical theory, and on the other, she modifies positions within critical theory by linking them with architecture. She assesses architecture as a cultural field that structures daily life and that embodies major contradictions inherent in modernity, arguing that architecture nonetheless has a certain capacity to adopt a critical stance vis-à-vis modernity.

Besides presenting a theoretical discussion of the relation between architecture, modernity, and dwelling, the book provides architectural students with an introduction to the discourse of critical theory. The subchapters on Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, and the Venice School (Tafuri, Dal Co, Cacciari) can be studied independently for this purpose.

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Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Writing Architecture)
by Elizabeth Grosz (Author) / Peter Eisenman (Foreword) / The MIT Press (Editor)

To be outside allows one a fresh perspective on the inside. In these essays, philosopher Elizabeth Grosz explores the ways in which two disciplines that are fundamentally outside each another--architecture and philosophy--can meet in a third space to interact free of their internal constraints. "Outside" also refers to those whose voices are not usually heard in architectural discourse but who inhabit its space--the destitute, the homeless, the sick, and the dying, as well as women and minorities.

Grosz asks how we can understand space differently in order to structure and inhabit our living arrangements accordingly. Two themes run throughout the book: temporal flow and sexual specificity. Grosz argues that time, change, and emergence, traditionally viewed as outside the concerns of space, must become more integral to the processes of design and construction. She also argues against architecture?s historical indifference to sexual specificity, asking what the existence of (at least) two sexes has to do with how we understand and experience space. Drawing on the work of such philosophers as Henri Bergson, Roger Caillois, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, and Jacques Lacan, Grosz raises abstract but nonformalistic questions about space, inhabitation, and building. All of the essays propose philosophical experiments to render space and building more mobile and dynamic.

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Architecture Theory since 1968
by K. Michael Hays (Editor) / The MIT Press (Editor)

In the discussion of architecture, the prevailing sentiment of the past three decades has been that cultural production can no longer be understood to arise spontaneously, as a matter of social course, but is constructed through ever more self-conscious theoretical procedures. The development of interpretive modes of various stripes--poststructuralist, Marxian, phenomenological, psychoanalytic, as well as others dissenting or eccentric--has given scholars a range of tools for rethinking architecture in relation to other fields and for reasserting architecture's general importance in intellectual discourse.

This long-awaited anthology is in some sense a sequel to Joan Ockman's Architecture Culture 1943-1968, A Documentary Anthology (1993). It presents forty-seven of the primary texts of contemporary architecture theory, introducing each by detailing the concepts and categories necessary for its understanding and evaluation. It also presents twelve documents of projects or events that had major theoretical repercussions for the period. Several of the essays appear here in English for the first time.

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Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000
by Dolores Hayden (Author) / Pantheon (Editor)

DesignAddict review:
In Building Suburbia Hayden elaborates on the development of communities like: Levittown, a community of standardized homes in Long Island; the Walt Disney Company's Town of Celebration, an exclusive suburb that blurs the line between fantasy and reality in Orlando; and Seaside, Florida, an area designed for "extended porch-sitting, leisurely strolling and sharing time with those you c are most about." She also describes the possibility of the future with MIT's "House_n," the prototype of an interactive digital home. Most of all she emphasizes the benefit of preserving and rejuvenating existing neighborhoods. - A. Rasmussen -

For almost two centuries Americans have been moving to the suburbs in search of affordable
family housing, unspoiled nature, and small-town sociability?only to find that their leafy
new neighborhoods are part of the growing metropolitan sprawl. It is to this contested cultural landscape, where most Americans now live, that Dolores Hayden draws our attention.

From nineteenth-century utopian communities and elite picturesque enclaves to early twentieth-century streetcar subdivisions and owner-built tracts to the vast postwar sitcom suburbs and the subsidized malls and office parks that followed (on a scale that earlier builders could never have imagined), Hayden reveals the cultural and economic patterns that have brought us to the present. She explores the interplay of natural and built environments, the complex antagonisms between real-estate developers and suburban residents, the hidden role of federal government, and the religious and ideological overtones of the ?American dream? embedded in the suburbs. Hayden asks hard questions about who has benefited from the suburban building process and about ?smart? growth and ?green? building. And she makes a strong case for the revitalization of existing neighborhoods in place of unchecked new growth on rural fringes.
Few readers will see our ubiquitous suburbs in the same way again.

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Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan
by Rem Koolhaas (Author) / Monacelli (Editor)

Since its original publication in 1978, Delirious New York has attained mythic status. Back in print in a newly designed edition, this influential cultural, architectural, and social history of New York is even more popular, selling out its first printing on publication. Rem Koolhaas's celebration and analysis of New York depicts the city as a metaphor for the incredible variety of human behavior. At the end of the nineteenth century, population, information, and technology explosions made Manhattan a laboratory for the invention and testing of a metropolitan lifestyle -- "the culture of congestion" -- and its architecture.

"Manhattan," he writes, "is the 20th century's Rosetta Stone . . . occupied by architectural mutations (Central Park, the Skyscraper), utopian fragments (Rockefeller Center, the U.N. Building), and irrational phenomena (Radio City Music Hall)." Koolhaas interprets and reinterprets the dynamic relationship between architecture and culture in a number of telling episodes of New York's history, including the imposition of the Manhattan grid, the creation of Coney Island, and the development of the skyscraper. Delirious New York is also packed with intriguing and fun facts and illustrated with witty watercolors and quirky archival drawings, photographs, postcards, and maps. The spirit of this visionary investigation of Manhattan equals the energy of the city itself.

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