ABSTRACT
Modernism and the Spirit of the City offers a new reading of the architectural modernism that emerged and flourished in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Rejecting the fashionable postmodernist arguments of the 1980s and '90s which damned modernist architecture as banal and monotonous, this collection of essays by eminent scholars investigates the complex cultural, social, and religious imperatives that lay below the smooth, white surfaces of new architecture.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |61 pages
Part I Geist
chapter |28 pages
Chapter 2 Straight or crooked streets?
The contested rational spirit of the modern metropolis
part |83 pages
Part II Place
chapter |22 pages
Chapter 4 Embodying the spirit of the metropolis
The Warenhaus Wertheim, Berlin, 1896–1904
chapter |32 pages
Chapter 6 The lantern and the glass
On the themes of renewal and dwelling in Le Corbusier's Purist art and architecture
part |72 pages
Faith
chapter |28 pages
Chapter 7 ‘Cities more fair to become the dwelling place of Thy children'
Transcendent modernity in British urban reconstruction