ABSTRACT
This book examines modernity’s multiplicity by documenting cutting edge research on architectural modernism in the developing world during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Originating in interwar Europe, modernist architecture – as a way of building, a knowledge product, a style-of-life consumer item, and above all, a symbol of modernity – has traversed national boundaries throughout the world. Despite the extensive adoption of modernist architecture in developing countries, standard history books focus on its development in the West. Up until the last three decades, academic inquiry into the built environment in developing societies concentrated on traditional forms. With the exception of the work of a very small number of acclaimed non-Western architects such as Hasan Fathy and Charles Correa, little attention was devoted to modern architecture in the Third World, which was considered merely lesser forms of Western modernism. This orientation has been changed as canonical narratives which privilege Western modes of thinking and aesthetics are challenged, and orientalist perspectives on other cultures are debunked. Informed by turbulent theoretical debates throughout the humanities and social sciences, scholarship on the farreaching variability of modernism has begun to grow, advancing our understanding of how modernist architecture was adopted, modifi ed, interpreted, and contested in different parts of the world.1 This discourse has focused on national building projects and their confrontation with and assimilation of modernism. Is it possible to transcend binary oppositions such as modern/traditional and core/ periphery while still recognizing the ongoing making of global modernity? Can the history of modernist architecture be more responsive to the realities of other histories? How did architectural modernism develop with reference not only to Western epistemology, but also to the experiences and knowledge of other Third World countries? And how did the implications of modernist architecture continuously shift in the context of confl icting relations involving nationalistic concerns, global aspirations, and the problems of underdevelopment?
