History Of Twentieth-century Architecture Research Articles

Archival plans, alterations, and 3D laser scanning of Erik Gunnar Asplund’s Stockholm Public Library

Erik Gunnar Asplund’s Stockholm Public Library is considered an important building in the history of twentieth-century architecture, yet relatively few archival plans have been saved from the library’s extended design process from 1919–25 and its subsequent construction until opening in 1928. This work presents the first systematic review of the available, digitised archival plans from Sweden’s National Centre for Architecture and Design (ArkDes), and explains Asplund’s gradual design and development of the project. Subsequent alterations in the library are briefly summarised, followed by the results from an extensive 3D laser scanning process throughout and around the building as it undergoes a significant period of renovation and maintenance. The results from 3D laser scanning create the first comprehensive and detailed record of the building for supporting future research, teaching, and renovation work. This study emphasises the mutual benefits of combining historical and technological approaches, and conducting academic research in parallel with contemporary renovation projects of historical architecture.

Between Bureaucratic Tradition and Professional Discourse: Turkey and the Case of SİSAG, 1969–77

ABSTRACTThe history of twentieth-century architecture in Turkey can be presented as a conflict between a powerful state bureaucracy and an independent architectural community: the former producing most of the buildings and infrastructure but with little verbalisation; the latter producing most of the discourse but building relatively little. This article examines a case that challenges this dichotomy. It focuses on the architectural department of SİSAG (1969–77), a company associated with Hacettepe University in Ankara, and the organisational, institutional and occupational modes and practices that it employed. The article explores both the architectural production of SİSAG and its role as the setting for the first white-collar strike in Turkey, and it unearths the intellectual and institutional discourse on the organisation of architectural production that surfaced with this confrontation. The article shows how, in the relationship between bureaucratic tradition and professional discourse, SİSAG took an ‘in-between’ position, its architects seeking to replace conflict with cooperation, and to reconcile ideas of public service, public interest and social engagement on the one hand with disciplinary knowledge, planning and design and independent research on the other.

Review: Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech, by Todd Gannon and Reyner Banham

Todd Gannon with Reyner Banham Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2017, 254 pp., 15 color and 115 b/w illus. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 9781606065303 With Reyner Banham's death in 1988 at age sixty-six, an iconic and complex career in twentieth-century architectural history, theory, and criticism came to an untimely end. Banham's twelve published books and more than seven hundred articles engage a wide array of fields, including pop art, automotive design, and cultural geography. His career-long emphasis on the relationship of engineering to modern architecture and his professional emergence among postwar London's artistic avant-garde made him a unique chronicler of the British high-tech movement, and of such related trends and groups as the New Brutalism and Archigram. His much-anticipated monograph on high-tech architecture, however, remained incomplete and unpublished at his death. In Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech , Todd Gannon takes this lacuna as a point of departure. Gannon's inclusion of Banham's previously unpublished introduction is a welcome addition to the book, as are his explorations of archival material from the Getty Foundation. The gist, however, is his broader reassessment of Banham's long-term engagement with postwar British architecture, of which high tech was a peak, and its relationship to mainstream modernism and postmodernism internationally. Banham seems to be undergoing a slow transformation from major figure within and contributor to a broader field into full-fledged topic of scholarly research. Entries in the literature are numerous, while thorough treatments are few. Nigel Whiteley's 2002 biography Reyner Banham: …

FICTION/NON-FICTION, OR:MYTH AND THE ARCHITECT’S ARCHITECTURE

Architecture is constructed not only in its images of objects, but also in its idealization of authorship. While the one–to–one association of with their Architecture perpetuates the illusion of the discipline’s agency and fosters impossible expectations of absolute control, broadly speaking, the originary and utopian impulse remains a fundamental component of an architect’s identity. The following paper confronts the largely unelaborated myths of the Architect’s Architecture presented by architectural discourse by way of three exaggerated Architectural figures depicted in works of fiction: Howard Roark (The Fountainhead), Stourley Kracklite (The Belly of an Architect) and The Architect (The Matrix trilogy). More specifically, the paper uses these heroic/antiheroic figures to explore three alternative relations of Architect to their Architecture. As such, the discussion performs two functions: it tests the fictionality of fictional and non-fictional constructs that reinforce and personify the myth of Architectural authorship, measuring fictional figures against non-fictional figures; and it presents an heuristic, offering both a perspective on the history of twentieth century architecture, and a means with which to negotiate cultural positioning in the ongoing present.

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...

Budapest, Haifa, Dubrovnik: Yona Friedman e le origini della megastruttura

Yona Friedman is not an easy figure to frame within the categories of twentieth century architectural history because he moved constantly between totally different places and disciplines. He was educated partly in Budapest and partly in Haifa, during the Second World War and the Israeli War of Independence. His primary interest in architecture was in fact accompanied by an interest in physics after attending two seminal conferences by Werner Heisenberg and by an interest in technology which leaves users free to modify architecture. Friedman obtained a degree in Israel from Technion, the Haifa Polytechnic, and thereby came into contact with Konrad Wachsmann who was a visiting professor. This was a decisive meeting because Wachsmann’s research (he was already a pioneer of prefabrication in Germany and then in the United States with Gropius) formed the basis for the birth and then the development of the idea of a megastructure of which Friedman was one of the founders.

Leïla el-Wakil, Hassan Fathy dans son temps

The history of twentieth century architecture reveals a number of cases in which one designer almost completely dominates the narrative of a country’s architectural culture; Alvar Aalto in Finland or Oscar Niemeyer in Brazil immediately come to mind. Similarly, any survey book on twentieth century architecture reduces a discussion of the architectural production of Egypt to the work of one man: Hassan Fathy. In his book Modern Architecture Since 1900, William J.R. Curtis gives Fathy ample att...

The Repair and Alterations of the De La Warr Pavilion

The Grade I listed De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex is widely considered to be the most important Modern Movement building of the 1930s in Britain, and is an important landmark in the history of twentieth-century architecture. Pioneering in structure as it was in spirit, the purpose of this steel and concrete pavilion was to provide accessible culture and leisure for the people. It was the first public building in Britain designed and built on International Style principles—an inspiration, amongst others, for the Royal Festival Hall—and is one of the few surviving buildings designed by Mendelsohn.The aim of the first section of this two-part paper is to outline the history of the De La Warr Pavilion, its rise and fall and, above all, the background factors that made its conservation possible and the context in which the project was developed. The second section will look in greater detail at the technical issues related to the causes of the building's demise and decay, its repair and the principles, methodology and techniques that were applied to the project.

Something to Talk about: Modernism, Discourse, Style

This article explores how a subterranean paradigm of style shapes a wide range of scholarly inquiry in twentieth-century architectural history and theory, despite long-standing recognition that modernism can in no way be reduced to style. It proposes that historians and theorists of twentieth-century architecture might do well to retain the notion of modernism in architecture as a coherent phenomenon, but to conceptualize it neither as a stock if variable constellation of formal tropes nor as any of the other instructive but partial alternatives that scholars have proposed. Instead, it should be conceptualized as a discourse. The concept of discourse, and the conceptualization of modernism in architecture as a discourse, resolves many analytical problems and handles the broad range of anomalous cases that have emerged in the framework of the style-based paradigm. Conceived as discourse rather than style, modernist architecture becomes both more coherent-a structured field containing a variety of equivalent strains-and more pluralistic-a heterologous array of formal practices and individual positions. The fundamental premise of the discourse of modernism is that architecture must instantiate an ethically grounded material practice that grapples with, rather than categorically rejects or ignores, the phenomenon of modernity itself.

Australia's Early Women Architects: Milestones and Achievements

Women architects have little if any information about their past to claim and relate to, not enough known history to define their professional roots and developments, and very few professional models to follow.2 [I]nserting…significant female figures into a historical record that has tended to ignore them [is] in itself…an essential contribution to twentieth century architectural history. [Such research says] something about the cultural conditions out of which such individual women emerged as architects: conditions that are the not-too-distant preconditions for the present professional status of women.3

Building the new world: studies in the modern architecture of Latin America, 1930-1960

The period between 1930 and 1960 in particular saw a dramatic upsurge in Latin American modern architecture as the various governments strove to make public their modernising intentions. After 1960, however, the year in which Brasilia was inaugurated, economic growth in the region slowed and the modernist project faltered. The English-speaking world, which had previously admired Latin American buildings, began to write them out of the history of twentieth-century architecture. Building the New World attempts to redress the balance. It surveys the most important examples of state-funded modernism in Latin America during a period of almost unimaginable optimism, when politicians and architects such as Pani, Costa, Reidy and Niemeyer sought ways, literally, to build their societies out of underdevelopment.

Peter Behrens and a new architecture for the twentieth century

Most histories of twentieth-century architecture cite Peter Behrens' influence on three of his proteges -- Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier -- and mention the turbine factory and arc lamp he designed for the German electrical firm AEG. Now Behrens' full contribution to the history of twentieth-century architecture is finally told, in Stanford Anderson's indispensable guide to one of the great designers of our century. The author was first attracted to Behrens as one of the emblematic figures in the development of architectural modernism. Over the years, he has reflected critically on the growing body of Behrens scholarship that has appeared on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as on the views of such tastemakers as Philip Johnson, who rejected Behrens' AEG Turbine Factory, the signature icon of his early experiments in modernism, in favor of his later conservatively classical work. Anderson now assimilates decades of research into a definitive work that considers Behrens from the most nuanced perspective yet and that clarifies many problematic issues such as Behrens' endorsement of historical determinism and his work on Hitler's proposed monumental axis in Berlin. The book looks at the cultural and architectural context in which Behrens worked, his early career, and the relation of his own house in Darmstadt to his ideal of a society where life is formed as art. It also looks at his directorship of the School of Arts and Crafts in Dusseldorf, where he drew on the work of such brilliant historiographers of art and architecture as Alois Riegl and August Schmarsow. In his conclusion, Anderson considers Behrens' melancholy in the face of modern industrial society and his avoidance of a direct address of life, despite, or rather because of, his professed commitment to express life as art.

Weissenhof 1927 and the modern movement in architecture

In summer of 1927, in a suburb of Stuttgart, an exhibition housing settlement built by sixteen of leading architects of Modern Movement opended to public. Greeted as a major event by advocates and opponents of new architecture, Weissenhof Siedling continues to excite strong interest. This unusally cohesive yet varied group of apartment buildings, row houses, and single-family houses--hailed by Philip Johnson as the most important group of buildings in modern architecture--remains a critical project in history of twentieth-century architecture. Richard Pommer and Christian F. Otto offer a comprehensive account of Weissenhof in relation to emergence and reception of modern architecture in 1920s. Recipient of Award for Excellence in Professional and Scholarly Publishing