Download or read book Architecture of Great Expositions 1937 1959 written by Rika Devos and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-09 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates architecture as a form of diplomacy in the context of the Second World War at six major European international and national expositions that took place between 1937 and 1959. The volume gives a fascinating account of architecture assuming the role of the carrier of war-related messages, some of them camouflaged while others quite frank. The famous standoffs between the Stalinist Russia and the Nazi Germany in Paris 1937, or the juxtaposition of the USSR and USA pavilions in Brussels 1958, are examples of very explicit shows of force. The book also discusses some less known - and more subtle - messages, revealed through an examination of several additional pavilions in both Paris and Brussels; of a series of expositions in Moscow; of the Universal Exhibition in Rome that was planned to open in 1942; and of London’s South Bank Exposition of 1951: all of them related, in one way or another, to either an anticipation of the global war or to its horrific aftermaths. A brief discussion of three pre-World War II American expositions that are reviewed in the Epilogue supports this point. It indicates a significant difference in the attitude of American exposition commissioners, who were less attuned to the looming war than their European counterparts. The book provides a novel assessment of modern architecture’s involvement with national representation. Whether in the service of Fascist Italy or of Imperial Japan, of Republican Spain or of the post-war Franquista regime, of the French Popular Front or of socialist Yugoslavia, of the arising FRG or of capitalist USA, of Stalinist Russia or of post-colonial Britain, exposition architecture during the period in question was driven by a deep faith in its ability to represent ideology. The book argues that this widespread confidence in architecture’s ability to act as a propaganda tool was one of the reasons why Modernist architecture lent itself to the service of such different masters.
Download or read book A History of Russian Exposition and Festival Architecture written by Alla Aronova and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-03 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of thirteen vignettes addresses several important episodes in the history of Russian temporary architecture and public art, from the royal festivals during the times of Peter the Great up to the recent venues including the Sochi Winter Olympics. The forms and the circumstances of their design were drastically different; however, the projects discussed in the book share a common feature: they have been instrumental in the construction of Russia’s national identity, with its perception of the West - simultaneously, a foe and a paragon - looming high over this process. The book offers a history of multidirectional relationships between diplomacy, propaganda, and architecture.
Download or read book Placing Internationalism written by Stephen Legg and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-11-04 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring how modern internationalism emerged as a negotiated process through international conferences, this edited collection studies the spaces and networks through which states, civil society institutions and anti-colonial political networks used these events to realise their visions of the international. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, contributors explore the spatial paradox of two fundamental features of modern internationalism. First, internationalism demanded the overcoming of space, transcending the nation-state in search of the shared interests of humankind. Second, internationalism was geographically contingent on the places in which people came together to conceive and enact their internationalist ideas. From Paris 1919 to Bandung 1955 and beyond, this book explores international conferences as the sites in which different forms of internationalism assumed material and social form. While international 'permanent institutions' such as the League of Nations, UN and Institute of Pacific Relations constantly negotiated national and imperial politics, lesser-resourced political networks also used international conferences to forward their more radical demands. Taken together these conferences radically expand our conception of where and how modern internationalism emerged, and make the case for focusing on internationalism in a contemporary moment when its merits are being called into question.
Download or read book Stalin s Architect written by Deyan Sudjic and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-06-14 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of Boris Iofan—designer of the iconic but unbuilt Palace of the Soviets—whose buildings came to define the language of Soviet architecture. What would an architect do for the chance to build the tallest building in the world? What would he sacrifice to stay alive in the midst of Stalin’s murderous purges? This is the first major publication on the remarkable life and career of Boris Iofan (1891–1976), state architect to Joseph Stalin. Iofan’s story is an insight into the troubled relationship of all successful architects with power. A gifted designer and a committed Communist, Iofan became the Soviet Union’s most celebrated architect after Alexei Rykov, Lenin’s successor, persuaded him to return to Moscow from Rome with his aristocratic wife, Olga Sasso-Ruffo. Iofan was at the heart of political life in the Soviet Union and his work is key to understanding its official culture. When Stalin’s henchmen crushed the architectural avant-garde, it was Iofan who created the new national style, from the grand projects he realized—including the House on the Embankment, a megastructure of 505 homes for the Soviet elite—to even more ambitious unbuilt projects, in particular the Palace of the Soviets, a baroque Stalinist dream whose image was reproduced throughout the Soviet Union. His career took him to New York and Paris, and to the destroyed city of Stalingrad. He was a friend of Frank Lloyd Wright; a rival of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Erich Mendelsohn; and an enemy of Hitler’s architect Albert Speer, whose Nazi pavilion faced Iofan’s Soviet one at the Paris Expo in 1937. He kept silent when Stalin executed his friends, including Rykov; he also sacrificed his own talent by following the dictator’s instructions to the letter in creating the regime’s landmarks. Generously illustrated, with a wide range of previously unpublished material, this book is an exploration of architecture as an instrument of statecraft. It is an insight into the key moments of 20th-century politics and culture from a unique perspective, and the personal story of a remarkable individual who witnessed many of the most dramatic turning points of modern history.
Download or read book Locating the Global written by Holger Weiss and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-08-10 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume adds to the plurality of global histories by locating the global through its articulation and manifestation within particular localities. It accomplishes this by bringing together interlinked case-studies that analyse various temporal and spatial dimensions of the global in the local and the interactions between the local and the global. The case-studies apply a spatial approach to analyse how global questions of space, movement, networks, borders, and territory are worked out at a local level. The material draws on the Nordic countries, Europe, the Atlantic world, Africa, and Australia and ranges from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. It is further divided into sections that address topics such as the translocality of humans and goods, local articulations of identities and globalities, parliamentarism and anti-colonialism, the organization of knowledge and the construction of spaces of representation and memory.
Download or read book Architecture of Great Expositions 1937 1959 written by Dr Vladimir Paperny and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2015-11-28 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates architecture as a form of diplomacy in the context of the Second World War at six major European international and national expositions that took place between 1937 and ’59. The volume gives a fascinating account of architecture assuming the role of the carrier of war-related messages, some of them camouflaged while others quite frank. The book provides a novel assessment of modern architecture’s involvement with national representation it also argues that this widespread confidence in architecture’s ability to act as a propaganda tool was one of the reasons why Modernist architecture lent itself to the service of such different masters.
Download or read book Exhibitions Beyond Boundaries written by Harriet Atkinson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-12-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After World War II, museum and gallery exhibitions, industrial and trade fairs, biennials, triennials, festivals and world's fairs increasingly came to be used as locations for the exercise of "soft power," for displays of cultural diplomacy between nations and as spaces for addressing areas of social and political contestation. Exhibitions Beyond Boundaries opens with a substantial introduction to the key debates, followed by case studies that advance the field of exhibition histories both geographically and methodologically, focusing on postwar transnational exchange and the wider networks engendered through exhibitions. Chapters trace relations across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, the Pacific, and the United States of America, drawing on a range of approaches and perspectives, principally from art and design history but also from social, economic and political history, and museum studies. Featured case studies include the presentation of African-American Art at FESMAN '66 and FESTAC '77, the US's 1961 Small Industries Exhibition in Colombo, Israel's early appearances at the Venice Biennale, the Vatican Pavilion at the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair, and Hong Kong's Pavilion at Expo 70 in Tokyo.
Download or read book Czechoslovakia at the World s Fairs written by Marta Filipová and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2024-11-30 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Established in 1918, as a new state the First Czechoslovak Republic was keen to project a distinct image. Participation in World Fairs offered the perfect opportunity-. In this comprehensive account of Czechoslovak participation in international exhibitions of the interwar period Marta Filipová looks beyond the sleek façade of the modernist pavilions to examine the intersections of architecture, art and design with commercial interests, state agendas, individual action and the public, offering a complex insight into the production and reception of national displays. The rich collection of images – mainly photographs – provides a close look at the Czechoslovak pavilions. The design, content and context of the displays convey an idealized narrative that was created for the fairs and the myths on which the Czechoslovak nation and state were built. Heavy machinery, modern art, tourist destinations, and food and drink were presented as Czechoslovak, while many aspects of social life – particularly women or ethnic minorities – were strikingly underrepresented or absent. The book argues that the objects and ideas that the pavilion organizers put on display legitimized and validated the existence of the new state through the inclusion and exclusion of exhibits, people, and ideas. While Marta Filipová primarily focuses on Czechoslovakia, she also offers insights into how other emerging nations projected and sustained their image during this historical period and how interwar world’s fairs accommodated them.
Download or read book Modern Architecture and Religious Communities 1850 1970 written by Kate Jordan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social groups formed around shared religious beliefs encountered significant change and challenges between the 1860s and the 1970s. This book is the first collection of essays of its kind to take a broad, thematically-driven case study approach to this genre of architecture and its associated visual culture and communal experience. Examples range from Nuns’ holy spaces celebrating the life of St Theresa of Lisieux to utopian American desert communities and their reliance on the philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin. Modern religious architecture converses with a broad spectrum of social, anthropological, cultural and theological discourses and the authors engage with them rigorously and innovatively. As such, new readings of sacred spaces offer new angles and perspectives on some of the dominant narratives of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries: empire, urban expansion, pluralism and modernity. In a post-traditional landscape, religious architecture suggests expansive ways of exploring themes including nostalgia and revivalism; engineering and technological innovation; prayer and spiritual experimentation; and the beauty of holiness for a brave new world. Shaped by the tensions and anxieties of the modern era and powerfully expressed in the space and material culture of faith, the architecture presented here creates a set of new turning points in the history of the built environment.
Download or read book Building a new New World written by Jean-Louis Cohen and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential exploration of how Russian ideas about the United States shaped architecture and urban design from the czarist era to the fall of the U.S.S.R. Idealized representations of America, as both an aspiration and a menace, played an important role in shaping Russian architecture and urban design from the American Revolution until the fall of the Soviet Union. Jean-Louis Cohen traces the powerful concept of “Amerikanizm” and its impact on Russia’s built environment from early czarist interest in Revolutionary America, through the spectacular World’s Fairs of the 19th century, to department stores, skyscrapers, and factories built in Russia using American methods during the 20th century. Visions of America also captivated the Russian avant-garde, from El Lissitzky to Moisei Ginzburg, and Cohen explores the ongoing artistic dialogue maintained between the two countries at the mid-century and in the late Soviet era, following a period of strategic competition. This first major study of Amerikanizm in the architecture of Russia makes a timely contribution to our understanding of modern architecture and its broader geopolitics.
Download or read book The Practice Turn in Architecture Brussels after 1968 written by Isabelle Doucet and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-07 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What makes a city? What makes architecture? And, what is to be included in the discussions of architecture and the city? Attempting to answer such ambitious questions, this book starts from a city’s specificity and complexity. In response to recent debates in architectural theory around the agency and locus of critical action, this book tests the potential of criticality through-practice. Rather than through conceptual and ideological categorisations, it studies how architecture and criticality work within specific circumstances. Brussels, a complex city with a turbulent architectural and urban past, forms a compelling case for examining the tensions between urban politics, architectural imaginations, society’s needs and desires, and the city’s history and fabric. Inspired by pragmatist-relational philosophies, this book tests the potential of criticality through-practice. It studies a series of critical actions and tools, which occurred in Brussels’ architectural and urban culture after 1968. Weaved together, Brussels architectural production emerges from a variety of actors, including architects, urban policy makers, activists, social workers, and citizens, but also architectural movements and ideologies, urban renewal programs, urban traumas, plans and projects, and mundane everyday practices and constructions. This book contributes to the study of Brussels and offers a timely contribution to recent scholarship on the critical reappraisal of architectural debates from the 1960s through to the 1990s. In addition, by showing how pragmatist-relational philosophies can be made relevant for architectural theory, the book opens hopeful potentials for how architectural theory can better contribute to the formulation of a critical agenda for architecture.
Download or read book Dream Super Express written by Jessamyn Abel and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A symbol of the "new Japan" displayed at World's Fairs, depicted in travel posters, and celebrated as the product of a national spirit of innovation, the Tōkaidō Shinkansen—the first bullet train, dubbed the "dream super-express"—represents the bold aspirations of a nation rebranding itself after military defeat, but also the deep problems caused by the unbridled postwar drive for economic growth. At the dawn of the space age, how could a train become such an important symbol? In Dream Super-Express, Jessamyn Abel contends that understanding the various, often contradictory, images of the bullet train reveals how infrastructure operates beyond its intended use as a means of transportation to perform cultural and sociological functions. The multi-layered dreams surrounding this high-speed railway tell a history not only of nation-building but of resistance and disruption. Though it constituted neither a major technological leap nor a new infrastructural connection, the train enchanted, enthralled, and enraged government officials, media pundits, community activists, novelists, and filmmakers. This history of imaginations around the monumental rail system resists the commonplace story of progress to consider the tug-of-war over the significance of the new line. Is it a vision of the future or a reminder of the past, an object of international admiration or a formidable threat? Does it enable new relationships and identities or reify existing social hierarchies? Tracing the meanings assigned to high-speed rail shows how it prompted a reimagination of identity on the levels of individual, metropolis, and nation in a changing Japan.
Download or read book Changing Cultures written by João Mascarenhas-Mateus and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2023-08-24 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The construction practices we employ in our daily life in European societies today were shaped by major changes in the past, such as the introduction and dissemination of Portland cement and reinforced concrete, a development that constitutes a fundamental chapter in the history of construction in the 19th and 20th centuries. Such changes were boosted by several innovations in the fields of applied mathematics, chemistry and physics. They involved patents licensing, optimization of materials production and machinery. There were new legislative frameworks, a specific knowledge transfer within a network of actors and the transformation of hierarchical frameworks. Written by international specialists, this two-part book is centred on case studies from the UK, Germany, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Portugal, Spain and Italy. The first part explores the mutual international influence between these countries and their intrinsic characteristics in this field, resulting from each nation’s particular economic, social, political, cultural and technological conditions. The second part focuses on the history of public works companies. Capable of carrying out both private works and major infrastructures, these players exemplify the technological and business advances that the construction sector has experienced over the last two centuries. This book is a must-read for researchers on contemporary construction history in Europe.
Download or read book World s Fairs in the Cold War written by Arthur P. Molella and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2019-09-13 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The post–World War II science-based technological revolution inevitably found its way into almost all international expositions with displays on atomic energy, space exploration, transportation, communications, and computers. Major advancements in Cold War science and technology helped to shape new visions of utopian futures, the stock-in-trade of world’s fairs. From the 1940s to the 1980s, expositions in the United States and around the world, from Brussels to Osaka to Brisbane, mirrored Cold War culture in a variety of ways, and also played an active role in shaping it. This volume illustrates the cultural change and strain spurred by the Cold War, a disruptive period of scientific and technological progress that ignited growing concern over the impact of such progress on the environment and humanistic and spiritual values. Through the lens of world’s fairs, contributors across disciplines offer an integrated exploration of the US–USSR rivalry from a global perspective and in the context of broader social and cultural phenomena—faith and religion, gender and family relations, urbanization and urban planning, fashion, modernization, and national identity—all of which were fundamentally reshaped by tensions and anxieties of the Atomic Age.
Download or read book The Joy of Sets written by Chris Horrocks and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2017-12-22 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a modern activity, one of the primary ways we consume information and entertainment, something we’ll do over dinner, at a bar, or even standing on the street peering into a store window—watch TV. Many of us spend countless hours in front of the tube, and even those of us who have proudly eliminated it from our lives can probably still rattle off the names of today’s most popular shows. But for as crucial as television viewing is in modern culture, the television set itself, as a ubiquitous object in our environment, rarely captures our attention—turn one off and it seems to all but disappear. In this book, Chris Horrocks tells the story of the television set, exploring its contradictory presence in our lives as both a material object and a conveyor of illusory images. Horrocks begins in the nineteenth century and television’s prehistory as a fantastic, futuristic concept. He follows the television’s journey from its strange roots in spiritualism, imperialism, and Victorian experiments in electro-magnetism to the contested accounts of its actual invention, looking at the work of engineering pioneers such as Philo Farnsworth and John Logie Baird. Unboxing sets all across the world, he details how it arrived as an essential consumer product and began to play an extraordinary role as a bridge between public and private life. Horrocks describes how the console and cabinet themselves expressed status and good taste and how their designs drew on cultural phenomena such as the space race and the avant-garde. He discusses how we have both loved it for what it can provide and reviled it as a sinister object literally controlling our thoughts, and he shows how it has figured in other cultural realms, such as the work of artists like Wolf Vostell and Nam June Paik. Finally, Horrock laments the death of the cathode ray tube and the emergence of the flat-screen, which has reduced the presence of the television as a significant material object. Altogether, The Joy of Sets brings this most elusive object into crystal-clear critical and historical focus.
Download or read book The Cold War in Universities written by Natalia Tsvetkova and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-09-27 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Cold War in Universities: U.S. and Soviet Cultural Diplomacy, 1945–1990 Natalia Tsvetkova offers an account of how professors and students restrained the Americanization or Sovietization of their national universities around the world during the Cold War.
Download or read book The Housing Project written by Gaia Caramellino and published by Leuven University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the twentieth century housing displays have proven to be a singular genre of architectural and design exhibitions. By crossing geographies and adopting multiple scales of observation – from domestic space to urban visions – this volume investigates a set of unexplored events devoted to housing and dwelling, organised by technical, professional, cultural or governmental institutions from the interwar years to the Cold War. The book offers a first critical assessment of twentieth-century housing exhibits and explores the role of exhibitions in the codification of notions of domesticity, social models, policies, and architectural and urban discourse. At the intersection of housing studies and the history of exhibitions, The Housing Project not only offers a novel angle on architectural history but also enriches scholarly perspectives in urban studies, cultural and media history, design, and consumption studies. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content). Contributors: Tamara Bjažić Klarin, Gaia Caramellino, John Crosse, Stéphanie Dadour, Rika Devos, Fredie Floré, Johanna Hartmann, Erin McKellar, Laetitia Overney, José Parra-Martínez, Mathilde Simonsen Dahl, Eva Storgaard, Ludovica Vacirca
