Review: Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism, by Anthony Vidler

Abstract

Anthony Vidler ; Histories of Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism . Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2008, 239 pp., 4 b/w illus. $24.95 (paperback) ISBN 9780262720519 In Histories of Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism , Anthony Vidler argues provocatively that architectural history has exercised a considerable influence over modern architecture since its beginnings——a surprising concept for a movement which, at its most polemical, rejected history and championed its own autonomy. Vidler summarizes his position with regard to this paradox: History was at once source, verification, and authorization (13). He problematizes this polemic by also maintaining that architectural autonomy is central to his understanding of modernism and writing of its narratives. Autonomy is defined as the notion that architecture, together with other arts, is bound to an internal exploration and transformation of its own specific language (17). He hints at a dialectical analysis of autonomy and history in book's introduction, and fully develops concept in final chapter. In between, separate chapters devoted to notable architectural histories written by Emil Kaufmann, Reyner Banham, Colin Rowe, and Manfredo Tafuri become vehicles that advance Vidler's effort to reconcile autonomy with history. Through these authors and their texts, he resumes dialectical juxtaposition of autonomy and history that shaped editorial agenda of influential journal Oppositions , which he edited and contributed to throughout its publication between 1973 and 1984.1 Vidler's investment in Oppositions ' intellectual mission finds new expression here, and its fundamental, underlying concerns——autonomy and history——connect chapters on each figure in a book that will doubtless generate renewed, lively debate on this unresolved topic. Vidler's book is valuable for its close reading of key texts by modernism's second generation of architectural historians——Rowe, Banham, and Tafuri——and for insight into their close historiographical and biographical links to its first generation of historians——Kaufmann and eemigrees Nikolaus Pevsner and Rudolf Wittkower——within context of post––World War II Great Britain. Vidler does not treat …