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.

part |26 pages

Introduction

part I|73 pages

Critiques of normative modernist narratives

chapter 2|18 pages

“Weak” modernism

Managing the threat of Brazil's modern architecture at MoMA

chapter 3|23 pages

Enchanted transfers

MoMA's Japanese Exhibition House and the secular occlusion of modernism

chapter 4|13 pages

Competing modernities

Socialist architecture's challenge to the global

part II|48 pages

New theoretical frameworks for thinking global modernism

chapter 6|17 pages

An architecture culture of “contact zones”

Prospects for an alternative historiography of modernism

chapter 7|12 pages

Intra-action

Barad's “agential realism” and modernism

chapter 8|17 pages

Layered networks

Beyond the local and the global in postcolonial modernism

part III|57 pages

Modernism and (trans)nationalism

chapter 9|19 pages

Uneven modernities

Rabindranth Tagore and the Bauhaus

chapter 10|20 pages

Unbuilt Iran

Modernism's counterproposal in Alvar Aalto's Museum of Modern Art in Shiraz

chapter 11|16 pages

Representing landscape, mediating wetness

Louis Kahn at Sher-e-Bangla Nagar (East Pakistan/Bangladesh)

part IV|65 pages

Rethinking agency in modernism

chapter 12|24 pages

Domestic funk

Favelados of the Global North

chapter 13|18 pages

CINVA to Siyabuswa

The unruly path of global self-help housing

chapter 14|21 pages

Subaltern-diasporic histories of modernism

Working on Australia's “Snowy Scheme”

part V|77 pages

Infrastructures and material cultures of global modernism

chapter 15|15 pages

The politics of concrete

Material culture, global modernism, and the project of decolonization in India

chapter 16|21 pages

Jane Drew in Lagos

Carbonization and colonization at BP House, 1960

chapter 17|17 pages

Provincializing ENI's disegno africano

Agip Tanzania and the Agip Motel in Dar es Salaam

chapter 18|22 pages

The politics of circulation

Cinema architecture in colonial Morocco

part |16 pages

Afterword