History Of Modern Architecture Research Articles

The Crux of Minimalist Architecture: A Local Strategy of Housing Design in Jakarta or a Break Free from Traditions?

During the 1950s, the idea of Minimalism presents itself as one of the response of the search of universal language in art and architecture. This particular style, which was started as an art movement, has received many critics in the relation to the loss of art but nevertheless Minimalism has spread all over the world and influenced many disciplines, including architecture. In minimalist architecture, elements of design convey simplicity, basic geometrical forms, with no decoration, and the use of white color, modern materials and clean spaces. The “less is more” movement in architecture, which can be seen in the works of Mies van der Rohe and also in the International Style that celebrates materiality and rationality, is also understood as Minimalism. Moreover, an important historical connection to minimalist architecture is the relationship to popular representations of how the upscale modern family lived. Recently, the idea of minimalist architecture appears in Indonesia as a preferable housing style. Adapting minimalist architecture to be suitable for a tropical climate can be done partly by modifying the forms and the microclimate such as using passive system approach or additional equipment that creates comfort in the building. This paper investigates the idea of minimalist architecture in Jakarta, Indonesia, and how the idea is widely used for housing. Some questions related to this study are investigating whether minimalist architecture in Jakarta shares the same principles with minimalist architecture in its earlier time or it is only a trend in housing design. Not only this study analyzes the moment when the idea of Minimalism develops in the history of modern architecture but also some important characteristics of minimalist architecture in different era and space. In addition, this study also discusses how minimalist architecture that happens in Jakarta becomes a way of dealing with both modern and local conditions, including a break free from traditions.

A Tale of Inconsistency: The Absence and Presence of Australia in the Historiography of Modern Architecture

This essay addresses the following question: How has Australia been portrayed in the historiography of modern architecture? From the early twentieth to the twenty-first century, from Henry-Russell Hitchcock to Jean-Louis Cohen, the presence of Australia in histories of modern architecture is inconsistent, with intermittent periods of absence. The historians’ choices of modern buildings and architects in Australia are similarly inconsistent. This essay investigates the different editions and expansions of the histories of modern architecture with a focus on those published after 1957, the year of the competition for the Sydney Opera House designed by Danish architect Jørn Utzon. Just as the different buildings and architects are relevant for the argument of this essay, it is necessary to discuss the differences in the historians’ own first-hand experience in Australia, as well as their inconsistent use of limited sources. It is precisely this inconsistency in references, both built and written, that gives an idea of the lack of connection between the general historiography of modern architecture and the research that has been undertaken in Australia on the history of the country’s modern architecture since 1984.

Rhodri Windsor Liscombe and Michelangelo Sabatino, Canada

Canada is latest volume in the global survey of the history of modern architecture by Reaktion Books. From Brazil to Turkey, Canada joins a current list of ten titles that explore the architectural history of twentieth-century architecture, focussing in particular on the lifecycle of Modernism as it has been adopted, reinterpreted and/or rejected around the world. Here, my use of architectural history and architecture in the same sentence is not a redundancy but a clarification of what the re...

Crafting the archive: Minnette De Silva, Architecture, and History

This article is about the work of Minnette De Silva, which made claims upon heritage and historical meaning through its concerns with craft. It investigates three facets of her oeuvre—her building, her writing and teaching, her design and handicraft—through the lens of her pictorial autobiography, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. She identified this remarkable publication as her ‘archives’, documenting in it her life and work (in the absence of a dedicated collection of records), and the equally notable twentieth-century sites and spheres through which she moved. Few careers invite critical investigation of South Asia's modern architectural forms and history as does that of De Silva, an understudied figure credited as a pioneer: a Sri Lanka Institute of Architects Gold Medal recipient, a Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Associate, a co-founder of the journal MARG, a participant in the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM), and an architect practising in a range of discursive media. This article argues that De Silva positioned her intellectual and practical labour as a basis for authority rooted in a situated knowledge. In a reading of gender, caste, race and labour that maintains a scholarly scepticism about the purpose of the artist's biography, this article recovers her life and work from a fragmented archive, including an interview with De Silva in the year before her death, as well as a consideration of craft—interrogating each vis-à-vis the politics of historiography.

Review: Obsolescence: An Architectural History, by Daniel M. Abramson

Daniel M. Abramson Obsolescence: An Architectural History Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016, 208 pp., 68 b/w illus. $35 (cloth), ISBN 9780226313450; $28 (paper), ISBN 9780226478050 At the beginning of the twentieth century, commercial buildings in the United States were being demolished within as little as five years. Histories of modern architecture have started their accounts with the development of the large U.S. office building before, but Daniel M. Abramson begins his new narrative with their destruction, and with a novel body of research into the office building as real estate and tax liability. This first chapter—which locates the invention of the concept of obsolescence—introduces a book that concludes with obsolescence's seeming nemesis, sustainability. It is a fine dialectic, Abramson shows, since the two paradigms do not so much oppose one another as address the same conundrum: how to manage change. Abramson is a member of Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative, a fulcrum of what we might term our discipline's materialist turn, by which architecture again represents material interactions that tell us about society's modes of production, economic relations, uneven development, and ecological precariousness. Obsolescence furnishes the perfect lens for such a materialist architectural history, since obsolescence was advanced by real estate experts in the 1910s and 1920s to explain seemingly premature demolitions, especially in the Chicago Loop, as the “result of changing technology, economics, and land use, in which the new would inevitably outperform and devalue the old” (3). The author shows that obsolescence—for all its lofty antecedence in Heraclitus's or Baudelaire's philosophies of transience, and for all its hold over popular culture, from the triennial automobile model change of the 1920s to the throwaway consumer culture after World War II—was initially entirely prosaic. Obsolescence was an invention of the U.S. real estate industry, which sought to write into corporate income tax code allowances for the depreciation of building investments. This the industry had achieved by the early 1930s, largely thanks to its cozy relationship with …

Constructing a new domestic discourse: the modern home in architectural journals and mass-market texts in early twentieth-century China

This paper explores how changing ideals of the modern home were articulated in China's architectural journals and mass-market texts during the 1920s and 1930s, a period in which many Chinese cities experienced increasing housing shortages for the working poor along with changing expectations of ‘contemporary’ dwellings for middle-income urbanites.1 More specifically, I examine how the design of residential houses and domestic arrangements became a subject of intellectual and political concern for architects and cultural intermediaries. By tracing the competing moral claims ascribed to the modern home through these writings, I illustrate their shifting assumptions about the ‘social role’ of architecture in the Chinese context. I argue that whilst these critiques were closely related to those in Europe and elsewhere, they were specific responses to accelerating capitalist urbanisation in China and were undergirded by a shared anxiety among Chinese elites and professional experts to institute an authentic modern design culture. Central to their efforts was the belief that well-designed dwellings would not only help to improve the lives of Chinese citizens, but also transform their everyday habits and develop China into a more ‘civilised’, healthy and productive nation. While modern architecture was promoted by architects as a key means to modernisation and social betterment, they debated the suitability and appropriateness of forms, aesthetics and domestic arrangements for the Chinese population, often selectively linking particular designs with (progressive) values that defined modernism in Western contexts as well as those associated with ‘Chinese culture and tradition’. Meanwhile, these expressions were utilised by those in building trades to encourage consumption for the home by projecting imaginaries of modern domestic life that did not always correspond with those of intellectual elites.These explorations, which build on expanding scholarship on modern architectural history in China, will contribute to a fuller understanding of the contradictory perspectives of architecture and domesticity in an unsettling period characterised by simmering social discontent and emerging nationalism. The attention to lesser-known, and arguably collectively important, figures in this study will elucidate the multifarious exchange of knowledge between different factions of architects and institutions beyond the familiar ones represented in existing historiography.2 Finally, the illustration of concerted attention to the problem of the home in this period will underscore the significance of domesticity in the construction of architectural discourse, which is an aspect that has been largely eschewed in the writings of modern architectural history.

The Transformation of Aesthetics in Architecture from Traditional to Modern Architecture: A case study of the Yoruba (southwestern) region of Nigeria

Aesthetics is the philosophical study of art and natural beauty and it is indicated by the feelings of pleasure or displeasure which comes from visual and aural elements and artefacts. Hence, aesthetics depends on the animate or inanimate organization which can be perceived either subjectively or objectively. This aesthetic element is uniquely present in the traditional buildings and modern buildings of the southwestern part of Nigeria. This study is set out to evaluate and bring into limelight the aesthetic characteristics of traditional buildings and that of the modern buildings, how one style or aesthetic element gradually prevail over or transform to another, reasons and consequences of one completely predominating another in Yoruba region of Nigeria. Moreover, this study therefore, is divided into four parts, which are: (a) overview of the history of modern and traditional Architecture of Yoruba land (b) aesthetic characteristics or indicators of traditional and modern architecture in Yoruba land, (c) the differences between the aesthetic of both styles of Architecture and what is responsible for this change or transformation in their aesthetic value. The research concludes with recommendations of synchronizing both styles of architecture design in getting an optimum aesthetic value and offers a room for further research and development of a consistent and notable architectural typology for southwest Nigeria.

Architecture and global imaginations in China

This article examines the changing consciousness of globality in the Chinese discourses of national and modernist architecture between 1949 and 1965. Drawing on recent scholarship concerning knowledge and representation, the study focuses on three crucial moments when Chinese architectural imaginings were decisively shaped by the dynamic relationship between a vexed Chinese situation and a shifting world stage: (1) the search for a ‘Socialist Realist’ architecture in relation to the Soviet Union and Eastern European socialist countries during the early 1950s; (2) the reception of modernist architecture in relation to an expansive internationalist view of the world in the second half of the 1950s; and (3) the re-evaluation of modernist architecture in relation to Third World nations during the early 1960s. The study demonstrates the world in Chinese architectural discourses not as a static one that could be neatly divided into a centre/periphery but a dynamic one constantly being reconstructed. The article reveals the history of modern architecture as a narration of tangled global and local experiences, instead of a linear one bounded within a nationally defined space.

Analysis on Development Trend of the Domestic Interior Design Pattern Based on the Regional Characteristics and Cultural Integration

Interior is the main space of human activities, which is an important part of human life and design activities, and is the link between spiritual civilization and material civilization. Interior design originates from life, and needs to solve the problem of the material world and spiritual world. People improve the living environment and life quality through interior designs. The style of design depends on the geographical features and various cultures, which reflects the artistic features and personality. The development history of modern architecture and interior design shows that the style of interior design is an important part of the whole architectural style, which reflects the design features of the whole building. Therefore, interior design and outdoor design should be in harmony. The orientation and characteristics of interior design determine the necessity of the style reforms. The future development trend of interior development may have the following characteristics: humanism, green design, nationalization, intelligence and regionalization.

Writing the history of Spanish modern architecture: texts by Flores and Fullaondo from the 1960s

It was in the 1960s when architects interested in organising the past had sufficient historical perspective to present different narratives for Spanish modern architecture. This paper discusses the writings of Carlos Flores and Juan Daniel Fullaondo, which were fundamental in the revision and reconstruction of the assimilation and evolution of modern architecture in Spain. Flores’s book Arquitectura Española Contemporánea stands out because of its spirited defence of modernity. Recognition of the iconographic value of architectural photography and the use of José Ortega y Gasset’s ‘The idea of the generations’ are the two main characteristics of this book. Whereas Fullaondo, who was in charge of a magazine, Nueva Forma, was a faithful advocate of the critical work of Bruno Zevi. He published different special issues in which he discussed the connection of German expressionism and Italian futurism in Spain, and defended organicism as the most influential tendency in Spanish architecture in the 1960s. This paper relates the main ideas of these authors with previous writings that began analysing modern buildings erected on Spanish soil, and with other remarkable books also published in the 1960s, such as those of Cesar Ortiz-Echagüe, Lluís Domènech and Oriol Bohigas. All in all, they established the principles of Spanish modern historiography, and influenced European magazines that were starting to pay attention to Spanish architecture by publishing special issues, such as the Swiss Werk or the Italian Zodiac.

「福島県庁舎」の設計と建設の過程

This study is a report on the design and construction process of “Fukushima Prefectural Government Office Building (1954)”. This building was designed by Koichi Sato (1878-1941). It began to construct from 1938 before WWII but completion was in 1954 after WWII and designed by Takekuni Ikeda (1924- ) who belonged to Toshiro Yamashita Architects Firm. Namely, on this building, two architects, who were famous for Japanese modern architectural history, were involved until completion. But information more than that, for example, the details of design before WWII and competition after WWII is not clear. In this study, author tried to find it by the newspaper articles and the document which remains in government office. The results are as follows: 1. This building project was begun earlier than “Shiga Prefectural Government Office Building” project which was the final completion before WWII. Nevertheless, it was not completed by delay of preparation of the construction materials. Author clarified the development process of the design of this building. Koichi Satoh designed five prefectural government office buildings. From the view of Satoh's careers of architectural work, this is the largest scale, the design which reflected all of his method of prefectural government buildings. And in case of “Shiga Prefectural Government Office Building”, he collaborated with Hiroshi Kunieda on the detail design phase. But in case of this, he designed alone. From these points, author showed that this building should be thought the grand sum for him in his prefectural government office building designs. 2. At first this building was designed in Reinforced Concrete Structure. But the construction of this building was cancelled after finishing first floor in 1939. After that, in 1940, this building extended second floor designed by Koichi Satoh by wooden frame structure. This extension is “Fukushima Prefectural Government Office Temporary Building” which no one knows in his architectural works. Author found its' outside appearance. 3. Author clarified, to some extent, the detail of the nomination design competition held in 1952. About this competition, only Takekuni Ikeda, who joined this as a chief designer of Toshiro Yamashita's Architect Firm wrote, but no one knows more than that. Four architects, who were Toshiro Yamashita, Yoshitoki Nishimura, Gumpei Matsuda, and Takeo Satoh, submitted their design for this competition. And Design Committee consisted of three referees, who were Hideto Kishida, Denji Nakamura, and Seiichi Kobayashi, chose Yamashita's design. Author found three designs to four submissions. As a result of comparison, instead of the design like a symbol of the authoritarianism before WWII, referees seek the design like a symbol of the democracy, and they finally chose Yamashita's design.

Towards Authenticity: Greece in Modern Architecture since 1900

In his Modern Architecture since 1900 (1982) William J.R. Curtis attempts to present a “balanced, readable overall view of the development of modern architecture from its beginning until the recent past” and to include the architecture of the non-western world, a subject overlooked by previous histories of modern architecture. Curtis places authenticity at the core of his research and uses it as the criterion to assess the historicity of modern architecture. While the second edition (1987) of Curtis‟ book appeared with just an addendum, for the third edition (1996) he undertook a full revision, expansion and reorganization of the content. This paper proposes that Curtis presented a more „authentic‟ account of the development of modern architecture in other parts of the world with the third edition of his book. In the first edition of Modern Architecture since 1900, Greece appears only as inspiration to the work of Le Corbusier: the Acropolis is regarded as having made the greatest impression in the memory of the modern master. It is not until the third edition that Curtis discusses Greek modern architecture, embodied in the work of Dimitris Pikionis in the late 1930s and later on in the 1950s. It is also not until the 1996 edition that Greece is „authentically‟ addressed in terms of „national identity‟, „universalism‟ or „regionalism‟. Between the first and the third editions of the book, regionalism in architecture was debated and framed in seminal essays and conferences by Curtis himself, Paul Rudolph and Kenneth Frampton. Focusing the attention on the example of Greek architecture, this paper will seek to discern developments in Curtis‟ discourse on regionalism between all of Modern Architecture since 1900 from inspiration to authenticity.

On the Grounds of Modern Architecture: An Interview with Kenneth Frampton

In connection with the publication of Kenneth Frampton’s A Genealogy of Modern Architecture: Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form , Thomas McQuillan conducted an interview in March of 2016 with Frampton to discuss the book’s background and the implications publication has for contemporary architecture. The book consists of close comparative analyses of 28 modern buildings, two by two, in order to interrogate their spatial, constructive, envelopmental, and programmatic characteristics. Prefaced by a synoptic note, with a highly concentrated exposition of the history of modern architecture, and building on his reading of Arendt’s The Human Condition , the book seeks the meaning of architecture in the tectonic — the way it is built — in more than just the spaces it affords and the images that it projects. Frampton shares the history of his ideas on tectonics and the fragility of the modern project in today’s neoliberal climate.

Shanghai College: An architectural history of the campus designed by Henry K. Murphy

American architect Henry Killam Murphy contributed extensively in designing college campuses, making him a significant figure in the history of modern Chinese architecture. This study investigates the influence of Western architecture on modern Chinese architecture based on the master plan of Shanghai College and its architectural design by Murphy. Shanghai College has been maintained by American Baptists since 1906. Its campus is the largest missionary college in China. The Shanghai municipal government designated the campus as a “HERITAGE ARCHITECTURE.” Thus, studying the design characteristics of Shanghai College is important to understand the history of Chinese architecture. From an architectural-historical point of view, studying the design of Shanghai College also helps describe the propagation and development of Western architecture in China. This study determines the historical significance of Shanghai College to help enhance the value of its buildings.

Architecture in the Age of the Spanish Habsburgs

First published in 1949 and revised in 1966, Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II offered a sweeping exploration of social history and geography in the late sixteenth century.1 Braudel used the long reign of Philip II (r. 1556–98) as a temporal framework for his study. He also employed the image of the Spanish Habsburg king to push his analysis beyond the geographic limits of the Mediterranean Sea to the larger globe, given that Philip had overseen the “first economic and political system that spanned the known world.”2 Building was one of the primary activities of this global political system and yet something that we know little about in early modern architectural history, given the narrowing lenses of nationalist history. Through these lenses, Spain is defined by its modern-day borders and conventional periodization, which, among other things, views colonial architecture in Latin America as always derivative of developments in Europe. In the same way that the age of Philip II served Braudel as a lens onto a wider world, the reign of the Spanish Habsburgs from 1516 to 1700 offers a useful frame for understanding the dynamics of architecture and urbanism in territories across its vast domain. A revised framework allows us to rethink long-standing approaches to the study of early modern European and European colonial architecture, especially in English-language scholarship, which is the focus of this essay. For instance, standard period and stylistic labels are limited when it comes to the architecture of the Spanish world. To begin, normative histories of architecture teach us that the Renaissance came late to Spain.3 Lingering medieval practices and forms found there around 1500 make Spain similar to places such as France, Germany, and England, where what Matt Kavaler calls a “Renaissance Gothic” …

Inventing the Rural: A Brief History of Modern Architecture in the Countryside

The rural has long occupied a valuable, if under‐theorised position in modern architectural history. Here, Cole Roskam, Assistant Professor of Architectural History at the University of Hong Kong, highlights key moments in this history and, in doing so, illuminates a central paradox at the heart of architecture's various turns to the countryside; namely, can architects maintain the physical and social integrity of the rural when they are themselves a fundamental vector of its changing character?

Brutalism Now: Rethinking Brutalism in Contemporary World Architecture

Brutalism has a privileged role in the history of modern architecture.[...]

‘Photographed at the Royal Festival Hall’ ... discursive constructions of dress, time and space in post-war British fashion media

Abstract This article discusses how the Royal Festival Hall (RFH) was featured as a location in editorial photo-spreads published in British fashion periodicals Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar throughout 1952.1 It invites another way of looking at the RFH, an often-celebrated architectural icon of British post-war history and democratic achievement. This article focuses upon the spatiality of the fashion magazine and addresses how this particular object context can aid the historical analysis of fashion imagery, and representations of space. Here a history of fashion, dress codes, femininity, modern architecture and post-war public cultural space is garnered within the sequential layout of the fashion magazine page.

History of Modern and Contemporary Architecture in Japan

History of Modern and Contemporary Architecture in Japan

洪洋社の建築出版活動の概要とその特質について

The purpose of this study is to examine the activity of architectural publisher KOYOSHA (1912-1944) from the characteristic of the publication and the persons involved with and is to locate its achievement within the framework of the history of modern architecture in Japan.As the result, below mentioned three points become clear; 1. Its activity is distinguished into three periods. 2. Those change is caused by relationship among the publisher and the authors. 3. Such process also indicates a role of architectural books, in response not only to theoretical promotion of the modernist architecture but also to social needs.