Download or read book The Socialist Life of Modern Architecture written by Juliana Maxim and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Socialist Life of Modern Architecture is the first systematic architectural history of Romania under socialism written in English. It examines the mechanisms through which modern architecture was invested with political meaning and, in reverse, how specific architectural solutions came to define the socialist experience. Each of the book’s three parts traces the historical development of one key aspect of Romania’s architectural culture between the years 1949–1964: the planning and construction of housing districts in Bucharest; the role of typification of design and standardization of construction in a project of cultural transformation; the production and management of a folk architectural tradition. Going beyond buildings and architects to consider the use of photography, painting, and novels, as well as narrations of history and the formation of an ethnographic architectural heritage, the author explores how buildings came to participate in the cultural imagination of socialism—and became, in fact, a privileged medium of socialism. Part of the growing interest in the significance of Soviet Bloc architecture, this is an important contribution to the fields of architectural history, cultural history, and visual culture.
Download or read book Architecture in Global Socialism written by Łukasz Stanek and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Abbreviations -- Chapter 1 Introduction Worldmaking of Architecture -- Chapter 2 A Global Development Path Accra, 1957-66 -- Chapter 3 Worlding Eastern Europe Lagos, 1966-79 -- Chapter 4 The World Socialist System Baghdad, 1958-90 -- Chapter 5 Socialism within Globalization Abu Dhabi and Kuwait City, 1979-90 -- Epilogue and Outlook -- A Note on Sources -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Image Credits.
Download or read book Exploding the Myths of Modern Architecture written by Malcolm Millais and published by White Lion Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity written by Kimberly Elman Zarecor and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2011-04-10 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eastern European prefabricated housing blocks are often vilified as the visible manifestations of everything that was wrong with state socialism. For many inside and outside the region, the uniformity of these buildings became symbols of the dullness and drudgery of everyday life. Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity complicates this common perception. Analyzing the cultural, intellectual, and professional debates surrounding the construction of mass housing in early postwar Czechoslovakia, Zarecor shows that these housing blocks served an essential function in the planned economy and reflected an interwar aesthetic, derived from constructivism and functionalism, that carried forward into the 1950s. With a focus on prefabricated and standardized housing built from 1945 to 1960, Zarecor offers broad and innovative insights into the country's transition from capitalism to state socialism. She demonstrates that during this shift, architects and engineers consistently strove to meet the needs of Czechs and Slovaks despite challenging economic conditions, a lack of material resources, and manufacturing and technological limitations. In the process, architects were asked to put aside their individual creative aspirations and transform themselves into technicians and industrial producers. Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity is the first comprehensive history of architectural practice and the emergence of prefabricated housing in the Eastern Bloc. Through discussions of individual architects and projects, as well as building typologies, professional associations, and institutional organization, it opens a rare window into the cultural and economic life of Eastern Europe during the early postwar period.
Download or read book Mass Housing written by Miles Glendinning and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-03-25 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major work provides the first comprehensive history of one of modernism's most defining and controversial architectural legacies: the 20th-century drive to provide 'homes for the people'. Vast programmes of mass housing – high-rise, low-rise, state-funded, and built in the modernist style – became a truly global phenomenon, leaving a legacy which has suffered waves of disillusionment in the West but which is now seeing a dramatic, 21st-century renaissance in the booming, crowded cities of East Asia. Providing a global approach to the history of Modernist mass-housing production, this authoritative study combines architectural history with the broader social, political, cultural aspects of mass housing – particularly the 'mass' politics of power and state-building throughout the 20th century. Exploring the relationship between built form, ideology, and political intervention, it shows how mass housing not only reflected the transnational ideals of the Modernist project, but also became a central legitimizing pillar of nation-states worldwide. In a compelling narrative which likens the spread of mass housing to a 'Hundred Years War' of successive campaigns and retreats, it traces the history around the globe from Europe via the USA, Soviet Union and a network of international outposts, to its ultimate, optimistic resurgence in China and the East – where it asks: Are we facing a new dawn for mass housing, or another 'great housing failure' in the making?
Download or read book From Bauhaus to Our House written by Tom Wolfe and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2009-11-24 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After critiquing—and infuriating—the art world with The Painted Word, award-winning author Tom Wolfe shared his less than favorable thoughts about modern architecture in From Bauhaus to Our Haus. In this examination of the strange saga of twentieth century architecture, Wolfe takes such European architects as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Bauhaus art school founder Walter Gropius to task for their glass and steel box designed buildings that have influenced—and infected—America’s cities.
Download or read book Designing Tito s Capital written by Brigitte Le Normand and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2014-07-21 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The devastation of World War II left the Yugoslavian capital of Belgrade in ruins. Communist Party leader Josip Broz Tito saw this as a golden opportunity to recreate the city through his own vision of socialism. In Designing Tito's Capital, Brigitte Le Normand analyzes the unprecedented planning process called for by the new leader, and the determination of planners to create an urban environment that would benefit all citizens. Led first by architect Nikola Dobrovic and later by Milos Somborski, planners blended the predominant school of European modernism and the socialist principles of efficient construction and space usage to produce a model for housing, green space, and working environments for the masses. A major influence was modernist Le Corbusier and his Athens Charter published in 1943, which called for the total reconstruction of European cities, transforming them into compact and verdant vertical cities unfettered by slumlords, private interests, and traffic congestion. As Yugoslavia transitioned toward self-management and market socialism, the functionalist district of New Belgrade and its modern living were lauded as the model city of socialist man. The glow of the utopian ideal would fade by the 1960s, when market socialism had raised expectations for living standards and the government was eager for inhabitants to finance their own housing. By 1972, a new master plan emerged under Aleksandar Dordevic, fashioned with the assistance of American experts. Espousing current theories about systems and rational process planning and using cutting edge computer technology, the new plan left behind the dream for a functionalist Belgrade and instead focused on managing growth trends. While the public resisted aspects of the new planning approach that seemed contrary to socialist values, it embraced the idea of a decentralized city connected by mass transit. Through extensive archival research and personal interviews with participants in the planning process, Le Normand's comprehensive study documents the evolution of 'New Belgrade' and its adoption and ultimate rejection of modernist principles, while also situating it within larger continental and global contexts of politics, economics, and urban planning.
Download or read book Modern Architecture written by Otto Wagner and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 1988 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1896, Otto Wagner's "Modern Architecture" shocked the European architectural community with its impassioned plea for an end to eclecticism and for a "modern" style suited to contemporary needs and ideals, utilizing the nascent constructional technologies and materials. Through the combined forces of his polemical, pedagogical, and professional efforts, this determined, newly appointed professor at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts emerged in the late 1890s - along with such contemporaries as Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow and Louis Sullivan in Chicago - as one of the leaders of the revolution soon to be identified as the "Modern Movement." Wagner's historic manifesto is now presented in a new English translation - the first in almost ninety years - based on the expanded 1902 text and noting emendations made to the 1896, 1898, and 1914 editions. In his introduction, Dr. Harry Mallgrave examines Wagner's tract against the backdrop of nineteenth-century theory, critically exploring the affinities of Wagner's revolutionary élan with the German eclectic debate of the 1840s, the materialistic tendencies of the 1870s and 1880s, and the emerging cultural ideology of modernity. Modern Architecture is one of those rare works in the literature of architecture that not only proclaimed the dawning of a new era, but also perspicaciously and cogently shaped the issues and the course of its development; it defined less the personal aspirations of one individual and more the collective hopes and dreams of a generation facing the sanguine promise of a new century
Download or read book Socialist Architecture written by Srdjan Jovanović Weiss and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Socialist Architecture ? The Reappearing Act' is a cooperation between the architect Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss and the photographer Armin Linke. Since 2009, Jovanovic Weiss and Linke are documenting the current state of selected places of socialistic architecture in the former Yugoslavia. After the disappearing of Yugoslavia, the inherited architecture often remained empty, in a kind of limbo between reutilisation and modern archaeological ruin. This documentation considered this indecisiveness in the five emerging democracies and investigates the relative impact on the spatial perception and the fate of the former ideological architecture of Yugoslavia.
Download or read book Politics in Color and Concrete written by Krisztina Fehérváry and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-16 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A historical anthropology of material transformations of homes in Hungary from the 1950s o the 1990s. Material culture in Eastern Europe under state socialism is remembered as uniformly gray, shabby, and monotonous—the worst of postwar modernist architecture and design. Politics in Color and Concrete revisits this history by exploring domestic space in Hungary from the 1950s through the 1990s and reconstructs the multi-textured and politicized aesthetics of daily life through the objects, spaces, and colors that made up this lived environment. Krisztina Féherváry shows that contemporary standards of living and ideas about normalcy have roots in late socialist consumer culture and are not merely products of postsocialist transitions or neoliberalism. This engaging study decenters conventional perspectives on consumer capitalism, home ownership, and citizenship in the new Europe. “A major reinterpretation of Soviet-style socialism and an innovative model for analyzing consumption.” —Katherine Verdery, The Graduate Center, City University of New York “Politics in Color and Concrete explains why the everyday is important, and shows why domestic aesthetics embody a crucially significant politics.” —Judith Farquhar, University of Chicago “The topic is extremely timely and relevant; the writing is lucid and thorough; the theory is complex and sophisticated without being overly dense, or daunting. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.” —Brad Weiss, College of William and Mary
Download or read book Ornament and Crime written by Adolf Loos and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2019-05-30 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revolutionary essays on design, aesthetics and materialism - from one of the great masters of modern architecture Adolf Loos, the great Viennese pioneer of modern architecture, was a hater of the fake, the fussy and the lavishly decorated, and a lover of stripped down, clean simplicity. He was also a writer of effervescent, caustic wit, as shown in this selection of essays on all aspects of design and aesthetics, from cities to glassware, furniture to footwear, architectural training to why 'the lack of ornament is a sign of intellectual power'. Translated by Shaun Whiteside With an epilogue by Joseph Masheck
Download or read book India written by Peter Scriver and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2015-02-15 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A place of astonishing contrasts, India is home to some of the world’s most ancient architectures as well as some of its most modern. It was the focus of some of the most important works created by Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, among other lesser-known masters, and it is regarded by many as one of the key sites of mid-twentieth century architectural design. As Peter Scriver and Amit Srivastava show in this book, however, India’s history of modern architecture began long before the nation’s independence as a modern state in 1947. Going back to the nineteenth century, Scriver and Srivastava look at the beginnings of modernism in colonial India and the ways that public works and patronage fostered new design practices that directly challenged the social order and values invested in the building traditions of the past. They then trace how India’s architecture embodies the dramatic shifts in Indian society and culture during the last century. Making sense of a broad range of sources, from private papers and photographic collections to the extensive records of the Indian Public Works Department, they provide the most rounded account of modern architecture in India that has yet been available.
Download or read book Building Socialism written by Christina Schwenkel and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-21 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following a decade of U.S. bombing campaigns that obliterated northern Vietnam, East Germany helped Vietnam rebuild in an act of socialist solidarity. In Building Socialism Christina Schwenkel examines the utopian visions of an expert group of Vietnamese and East German urban planners who sought to transform the devastated industrial town of Vinh into a model socialist city. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research in Vietnam and Germany with architects, engineers, construction workers, and tenants in Vinh’s mass housing complex, Schwenkel explores the material and affective dimensions of urban possibility and the quick fall of Vinh’s new built environment into unplanned obsolescence. She analyzes the tensions between aspirational infrastructure and postwar uncertainty to show how design models and practices that circulated between the socialist North and the decolonizing South underwent significant modification to accommodate alternative cultural logics and ideas about urban futurity. By documenting the building of Vietnam’s first planned city and its aftermath of decay and repurposing, Schwenkel argues that underlying the ambivalent and often unpredictable responses to modernist architectural forms were anxieties about modernity and the future of socialism itself.
Download or read book Modernism In between written by Vladimir Kulić and published by Jovis Verlag. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Socialist Yugoslavia was a country suspended between civilizations, political systems, and Cold War blocs. It produced a remarkable body of modern architecture. This book explores the historical 'in-betweenness' of Yugoslav modernism and captures its visual richness and complexity through Wolfgang Thaler's new photographs --publisher.
Download or read book For a Socialist Architecture written by Simon Elmer and published by . This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the summer of 2019, as part of a research fellowship, the UK practice Architects for Social Housing (ASH) took up a month's residency in Vancouver. Drawing on the past five years of practice working with residents of housing estates threatened with demolition, ASH presented their thoughts about the necessity and possibility of a socialist architecture under capitalism. To do so, they looked at the social, environmental, economic and political spheres of architecture, and how they can be reclaimed from the hegemony of neoliberalism in legislation, policy and practice. In a series of four lectures, ASH mapped out the development process from 1) strategy, legislation and policy, to 2) urban design, master-planning and brief development, to 3) project design and the planning process, to 4) procurement and construction, to 5) management and maintenance, and identified the moments of political agency at which the agents for a socialist architecture can intervene in and disrupt the capitalist structure and functioning of this process. In addition, ASH also identified moments that are outside this development process proper, but which can be brought to bear upon it, including the tasks of education, dissemination and agitation for change. In doing so, they have developed a framework for both individual and collective agency that extends far beyond the skills of an architect, and is not limited to either industry professionals or the layman's protest. ASH contends that all of us are potential agents for a socialist architecture; but to be called 'socialist' that agency must go beyond voting and protest - both of which give legitimacy to the illusory 'freedom' of capitalist democracies - to oppositional political practice. For this printed edition of the lectures, ASH has included two additional texts: an introduction, which was originally published in January 2020, following the UK general election; and a postscript, which looks at the ruinous impact of lockdown restrictions on UK housing and how we can respond. In publishing the expanded forms of these lectures, ASH aims to make their contents available not only to people who are threatened by the crisis of housing affordability in the UK, but also to policy-writers looking for alternatives to the selling off of public land and housing to private investors, as well as to architects looking for an alternative to the orthodoxies of contemporary architectural practice.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures written by Aga Skrodzka and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-01 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stereotypes often cast communism as a defunct, bankrupt ideology and a relic of the distant past. However, recent political movements like Europe's anti-austerity protests, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street suggest that communism is still very much relevant and may even hold the key to a new, idealized future. In The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures, contributors trace the legacies of communist ideology in visual culture, from buildings and monuments, murals and sculpture, to recycling campaigns and wall newspapers, all of which work to make communism's ideas and values material. Contributors work to resist the widespread demonization of communism, demystifying its ideals and suggesting that it has visually shaped the modern world in undeniable and complex ways. Together, contributors answer curcial questions like: What can be salvaged and reused from past communist experiments? How has communism impacted the cultures of late capitalism? And how have histories of communism left behind visual traces of potential utopias? An interdisciplinary look at the cultural currency of communism today, The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures demonstrates the value of revisiting the practices of the past to form a better vision of the future.
Download or read book Architectural Drawings of the Russian Avant garde written by Catherine Cooke and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
