ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys the progression of the term “autonomy” in different cultural realms from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. It initially problematizes the disciplinary autonomy that, especially in the United States, dissociated architecture from culture and society based on the fallacious belief that autonomy implied detachment. It examines the philosophical genesis of the “autonomy of the will” formulated by Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century; the attempt of the avant-garde movements to restore the links between art and society; the defense of the political sphere by Hannah Arendt and Carl Schmitt against the normalization of prescribed social behavior; the revelation of the dark side of autonomy’s rational character during the twentieth century; and the urban dimension of autonomen Architektur retroactively formulated by the art historian Emil Kaufmann.
