Download or read book Reconstructing modernity written by James Greenhalgh and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconstructing modernity assesses the character of approaches to rebuilding British cities during the decades after the Second World War. It explores the strategies of spatial governance that sought to restructure society and looks at the cast of characters who shaped these processes. It challenges traditional views of urban modernism and sheds new light on the importance of the immediate post-war for the trajectory of planned urban renewal in twentieth century. It examines plans and policies designed to produce and govern lived spaces— shopping centers, housing estates, parks, schools and homes — and shows how and why they succeeded or failed. It demonstrates how the material space of the city and how people used and experienced it was crucial in understanding historical change in urban contexts. The book is aimed at those interested in urban modernism, the use of space in town planning, the urban histories of post-war Britain and of social housing.
Download or read book Between Heaven and Modernity written by Peter J. Carroll and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining social, political, and cultural history, this book examines the contestation over space, history, and power in the late Qing and Republican-era reconstruction of the ancient capital of Suzhou as a modern city. Located fifty miles west of Shanghai, Suzhou has been celebrated throughout Asia as a cynosure of Chinese urbanity and economic plenty for a thousand years. With the city's 1895 opening as a treaty port, businessmen and state officials began to draw on Western urban planning in order to bolster Chinese political and economic power against Japanese encroachment. As a result, both Suzhou as a whole and individual components of the cityscape developed new significance according to a calculus of commerce and nationalism. Japanese monks and travelers, Chinese officials, local people, and others competed to claim Suzhou’s streets, state institutions, historic monuments, and temples, and thereby to define the course of Suzhou’s and greater China’s modernity.
Download or read book The Rural Modern written by Kate Merkel-Hess and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-08-17 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discussions of China’s early twentieth-century modernization efforts tend to focus almost exclusively on cities, and the changes, both cultural and industrial, seen there. As a result, the communist peasant revolution appears as a decisive historical break. Kate Merkel-Hess corrects that misconception by demonstrating how crucial the countryside was for reformers in China long before the success of the communist revolution. In The Rural Modern, Merkel-Hess shows that Chinese reformers and intellectuals created an idea of modernity that was not simply about what was foreign and new, as in Shanghai and other cities, but instead captured the Chinese people’s desire for social and political change rooted in rural traditions and institutions. She traces efforts to remake village education, economics, and politics, analyzing how these efforts contributed to a new, inclusive vision of rural Chinese life. Merkel-Hess argues that as China sought to redefine itself, such rural reform efforts played a major role, and tensions that emerged between rural and urban ways deeply informed social relations, government policies, and subsequent efforts to create a modern nation during the communist period.
Download or read book Late Modernity and Social Change written by Brian Heaphy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-09-12 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this incisive text, Heaphy introduces the work of Giddens, Bauman, Foucault and Baudrillard to show exactly how the arguments of the great contemporary theorists play out against extended examples from real-life.
Download or read book Reconstructing Modernism written by Ashley Maher and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-12 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconstructing Modernism establishes for the first time the centrality of modernist buildings and architectural periodicals to British mid-century literature. Drawing upon a wealth of previously unexplored architectural criticism by British authors, this book reveals how arguments about architecture led to innovations in literature, as well as to redesigns in the concept of modernism itself. While the city has long been a focus of literary modernist studies, architectural modernism has never had its due. Scholars usually characterize architectural modernism as a parallel modernism or even an incompatible modernism to literature. Giving special attention to dystopian classics Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, this study argues that sustained attention to modern architecture shaped mid-century authors' political and aesthetic commitments. After many writers deemed modernist architects to be agents for communism and other collectivist movements, they squared themselves—and literary modernist detachment and aesthetic autonomy—against the seemingly tyrannical utopianism of modern architecture; literary aesthetic qualities were reclaimed as political qualities. In this way, Reconstructing Modernism redraws the boundaries of literary modernist studies: rather than simply adding to its canon, it argues that the responsibility for defining literary modernism for the mid-century public was shared by an incredible variety of authors—Edwardians, modernists, satirists, and even anti-modernists.
Download or read book Reconstructing Chinatown written by Jan Lin and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the American popular imagination, Chinatown is a mysterious and dangerous place, clannish and dilapidated, filled with sweatshops, vice, and organizational crime. This volume presents a real-world picture of New York City's Chinatown, countering the "orientalist" view by looking at the human dimensions and the larger forces of globalization that make this neighbourhood both unique and broadly instructive.
Download or read book Modernism and the Professional Architecture Journal written by Torsten Schmiedeknecht and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-06-27 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The production of this book stems from two of the editors’ longstanding research interests: the representation of architecture in print media, and the complex identity of the second phase of modernism in architecture given the role it played in postwar reconstruction in Europe. While the history of postwar reconstruction has been increasingly well covered for most European countries, research investigating postwar architectural magazines and journals across Europe – their role in the discourse and production of the built environment and particularly their inter-relationship and differing conceptions of postwar architecture – is relatively undeveloped. Modernism and the Professional Architecture Journal sounds out this territory in a new collection of essays concerning the second phase of the reception and assimilation of modernism in architecture, as it was represented in professional architecture journals during the period of postwar reconstruction (1945–1968). Professional architecture journals are often seen as conduits of established facts and knowledge. The role mainstream publications play, however, in establishing ‘movements’, ‘trends’ or ‘debates’ tends to be undervalued. In the context of the complex undertaking of postwar reconstruction, the shortage of resources, political uncertainty and the biographical complexities of individual architects, the chapters on key European architecture journals collected here reveal how modernist architecture, and its discourse, was perceived and disseminated in different European countries.
Download or read book Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery written by Dale W. Tomich and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-03-19 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Assessing a unique collection of more than eighty images, this innovative study of visual culture reveals the productive organization of plantation landscapes in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These landscapes—from cotton fields in the Lower Mississippi Valley to sugar plantations in western Cuba and coffee plantations in Brazil's Paraiba Valley—demonstrate how the restructuring of the capitalist world economy led to the formation of new zones of commodity production. By extension, these environments radically transformed slave labor and the role such labor played in the expansion of the global economy. Artists and mapmakers documented in surprising detail how the physical organization of the landscape itself made possible the increased exploitation of enslaved labor. Reading these images today, one sees how technologies combined with evolving conceptions of plantation management that reduced enslaved workers to black bodies. Planter control of enslaved people's lives and labor maximized the production of each crop in a calculated system of production. Nature, too, was affected: the massive increase in the scale of production and new systems of cultivation increased the land's output. Responding to world economic conditions, the replication of slave-based commodity production became integral to the creation of mass markets for cotton, sugar, and coffee, which remain at the center of contemporary life.
Download or read book Building the Buddhist Revival written by Gregory Adam Scott and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1850 and 1966, tens of thousands of Buddhist sacred sites in China were destroyed, victims of targeted destruction, accidental damage, or simply neglect. During the same period, however, many of these sites were reconstructed, a process that involved both rebuilding material structures and reviving religious communities. Gregory Adam Scott argues that over the course of this period monastery reconstruction in China changed drastically. The power to determine whether and how a monastery would be reconstructed, and the types of activities that would be reinstated or newly introduced, began to shift from religious leaders and communities to state agencies that had a radically different set of motivations and values. Building the Buddhist Revival explores the history of Chinese Buddhist monastery reconstruction from the end of the Imperial period through the first seventeen years of the People's Republic.
Download or read book Constructing Modernity written by Martin Hammer and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Naum Gabo (1890-1977), whose eventful life took him from his native Russia to Berlin, Paris, London, and finally the United States, achieved renown as one of the most inventive and controversial figures in twentieth-century sculpture. This book is the first comprehensive account of Gabo's life, career, and artistic theory and practice. Martin Hammer and Christina Lodder explore in detail the evolution of the artist's work and his aesthetic concerns, creative processes, assimilation of such new materials as plastic, and approach to public sculpture. The authors also examine his response to the scientific and political revolutions of his age and trace the origins and development of Gabo's utopian conviction that Constructivist art was profoundly in tune with modernity, social progress, and advances in science and technology. Drawing on Gabo's extensive and largely unpublished archives of letters, diaries, notebooks, models, and sketchbooks, Hammer and Lodder discuss the sculptor's work in the context of his relations with other avant-garde artists, architects, and critics, including his brother Antoine Pevsner. They also situate his aesthetic theory and practice within the Constructi
Download or read book Anthony Giddens and Modern Social Theory written by Kenneth Tucker and published by SAGE. This book was released on 1998-09-24 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthony Giddens is widely recognized as one of the most important sociologists of the post-war period. This is the first full-length work to examine Giddens′ social theory. It guides the reader through Giddens′ early attempt to overcome the duality of structure and agency. He saw this duality as a major failing of social theories of modernity. His attempt to resolve the problem can be regarded as the key to the development of his brandmark `structuration theory′. The book is the most complete and thorough assessment of Giddens′ work currently available. It incorporates insights from many different perspectives into his theory of structuration, his work on the formation of cultural identities and the fate of the nation-state. This far-reaching work also touches on issues such as the transformation of modern intimacy and sexuality, and the fate of politics in late modern society.
Download or read book Moments of Modernity written by Becky Conekin and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gift to King's University College Library from Prof. Brian Patton, 2005.
Download or read book The Collected Essays and Criticism Volume 4 written by Clement Greenberg and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clement Greenberg is widely recognized as the most influential and articulate champion of modernism during its American ascendency after World War II, the period largely covered by these highly acclaimed volumes of The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 3: Affirmations and Refusals presents Greenberg's writings from the period between 1950 and 1956, while Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance gathers essays and criticism of the years 1957 to 1969. The 120 works range from little-known pieces originally appearing Vogue and Harper's Bazaar to such celebrated essays as "The Plight of Our Culture" (1953), "Modernist Painting" (1960), and "Post Painterly Abstraction" (1964). Preserved in their original form, these writings allow readers to witness the development and direction of Greenberg's criticism, from his advocacy of abstract expressionism to his enthusiasm for color-field painting. With the inclusion of critical exchanges between Greenberg and F. R. Leavis, Fairfield Porter, Thomas B. Hess, Herbert Read, Max Kozloff, and Robert Goldwater, these volumes are essential sources in the ongoing debate over modern art. For each volume, John O'Brian has furnished an introduction, a selected bibliography, and a brief summary of events that places the criticism in its artistic and historical context.
Download or read book Thatcher s Progress written by Guy Ortolano and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-27 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Horizons -- Planning -- Architecture -- Community -- Consulting -- Housing.
Download or read book The Collected Essays and Criticism Volume 3 written by Clement Greenberg and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clement Greenberg is widely recognized as the most influential and articulate champion of modernism during its American ascendency after World War II, the period largely covered by these highly acclaimed volumes of The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 3: Affirmations and Refusals presents Greenberg's writings from the period between 1950 and 1956, while Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance gathers essays and criticism of the years 1957 to 1969. The 120 works range from little-known pieces originally appearing Vogue and Harper's Bazaar to such celebrated essays as "The Plight of Our Culture" (1953), "Modernist Painting" (1960), and "Post Painterly Abstraction" (1964). Preserved in their original form, these writings allow readers to witness the development and direction of Greenberg's criticism, from his advocacy of abstract expressionism to his enthusiasm for color-field painting. With the inclusion of critical exchanges between Greenberg and F. R. Leavis, Fairfield Porter, Thomas B. Hess, Herbert Read, Max Kozloff, and Robert Goldwater, these volumes are essential sources in the ongoing debate over modern art. For each volume, John O'Brian has furnished an introduction, a selected bibliography, and a brief summary of events that places the criticism in its artistic and historical context.
Download or read book Wasted Lives written by Zygmunt Bauman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-26 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The production of ‘human waste’ – or more precisely, wasted lives, the ‘superfluous’ populations of migrants, refugees and other outcasts – is an inevitable outcome of modernization. It is an unavoidable side-effect of economic progress and the quest for order which is characteristic of modernity. As long as large parts of the world remained wholly or partly unaffected by modernization, they were treated by modernizing societies as lands that were able to absorb the excess of population in the ‘developed countries’. Global solutions were sought, and temporarily found, to locally produced overpopulation problems. But as modernization has reached the furthest lands of the planet, ‘redundant population’ is produced everywhere and all localities have to bear the consequences of modernity’s global triumph. They are now confronted with the need to seek – in vain, it seems – local solutions to globally produced problems. The global spread of the modernity has given rise to growing quantities of human beings who are deprived of adequate means of survival, but the planet is fast running out of places to put them. Hence the new anxieties about ‘immigrants’ and ‘asylum seekers’ and the growing role played by diffuse ‘security fears’ on the contemporary political agenda. With characteristic brilliance, this new book by Zygmunt Bauman unravels the impact of this transformation on our contemporary culture and politics and shows that the problem of coping with ‘human waste’ provides a key for understanding some otherwise baffling features of our shared life, from the strategies of global domination to the most intimate aspects of human relationships.
Download or read book At Home in Postwar France written by Nicole C. Rudolph and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2015-03-01 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After World War II, France embarked on a project of modernization, which included the development of the modern mass home. At Home in Postwar France examines key groups of actors — state officials, architects, sociologists and tastemakers — arguing that modernizers looked to the home as a site for social engineering and nation-building; designers and advocates of the modern home contributed to the democratization of French society; and the French home of the Trente Glorieuses, as it was built and inhabited, was a hybrid product of architects’, planners’, and residents’ understandings of modernity. This volume identifies the “right to comfort” as an invention of the postwar period and suggests that the modern mass home played a vital role in shaping new expectations for well-being and happiness.
