ABSTRACT
This anthology collects developing scholarship that outlines a new decentred history of global modernism in architecture using postcolonial and other related theoretical frameworks.
By both revisiting the canons of modernism and seeking to decolonize and globalize those canons, the volume explores what a genuinely "global" history of architectural modernism might begin to look like. Its chapters explore the historiography and weaknesses of modernism's normative interpretations and propose alternatives to them. The collection offers essays that interrogate transnationalism in new ways, reconsiders the agency of the subaltern and the roles played by infrastructures, materials, and global institutions in propagating a diversity of modernisms internationally. Issues such as colonial modernism, architectural pedagogy, cultural imperialism, and spirituality are engaged.
With essays from both established scholars and up-and-coming researchers, this is an important reference for a new understanding of this crucial and developing topic.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |26 pages
Introduction
part I|73 pages
Critiques of normative modernist narratives
chapter 3|23 pages
Enchanted transfers
part II|48 pages
New theoretical frameworks for thinking global modernism
chapter 6|17 pages
An architecture culture of “contact zones”
part III|57 pages
Modernism and (trans)nationalism
chapter 10|20 pages
Unbuilt Iran
chapter 11|16 pages
Representing landscape, mediating wetness
part IV|65 pages
Rethinking agency in modernism
part V|77 pages
Infrastructures and material cultures of global modernism
chapter 15|15 pages
The politics of concrete
chapter 17|17 pages
Provincializing ENI's disegno africano
part |16 pages
Afterword