Review: Rebuilding Babel: Modern Architecture and Internationalism, by Mark Crinson

Abstract

Mark Crinson Rebuilding Babel: Modern Architecture and Internationalism London: I. B. Tauris, 2017, 320 pp., 9 color and 60 b/w illus. $35 (cloth), ISBN 9781784537128 Modernism is still not a closed chapter of architecture's historiography, and Mark Crinson's latest book proves it. In Rebuilding Babel , Crinson addresses modernism from an angle little explored until now: its internationalism. Aiming to deliver a new historiographical perspective, he does so by resorting to the powerful metaphor of the Tower of Babel, which he employs not only for its evocative nature but also for its capacity to open up a more complex discussion. Such a nuanced approach is much needed, given the multiple threads that the book attempts to unravel as it constantly drifts between modernism and internationalism, superimposing and confronting the two phenomena. If this confrontation is sometimes confusing for the reader, for Crinson it reflects the very essence of the twentieth century: as in the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, what is important is the idea of a common endeavor, the aspiration of a united humankind striving to build a shared ideal. How to define this shared ideal? Crinson proposes, in his introduction, two metaphors that encapsulate its meaning and its illusory achievement. The first metaphor references unrootedness—through Adelbert von Chamisso's novella Peter Schlemihl (1814), the story of a man who loses his shadow—as the free transgression of “the borders of disciplines and nations” (2). The second unveils internationalism as a mismatch: the architectural fragments juxtaposed in the Congolese artist Bodys Isek Kingelez's sculpture U.N. (1995) compose a shimmering edifice that is nonetheless deprived of meaning. From this twofold perspective, internationalism appears as a multifaceted notion, prone to ambiguities. Willing to clarify all possible misunderstandings but also aiming to assess the evolution of this notion since the end of the nineteenth century, Crinson offers his readers welcome distinctions in terminology. He parallels internationalism with other apparently similar terms, such as globalization , globalism , …