Modernism and the Spirit of the City / Edition 1

by Iain Boyd Whyte

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415258401
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	09/04/2003
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Iain Boyd Whyte is Professor of Architectural History at the University of Edinburgh. He has written extensively on early-modernist history and theory, with books on Bruno Taut, Hendrik Petrus Berlage, and the school of Otto Wagner. Among his current projects is an anthology of texts on the German-speaking metropolis, 1880-1940.

Table of Contents

Introduction. Part I Geist. 1.From locus genii to Heart of the City: Embracing the Spirit of the City. 2. Straight or Crooked Streets? The Contested Rational Spirit of the Modern Metropolis. 3. August Endell: The Spirit and the Beauty of the City. Part II Place. 4. Embodying the Spirit of the Metropolis: the Warenhaus Wetheim, Berlin. 5. The Hamburg Bismarck as City Crown and National Monument. 6. The Lantern and the Glass: On the Themes of Renewal and Dwelling in Le Corbusier's Purist Art and Architecture. Part III Faith. 7. "Cities More Fair to Become the Dwelling Place of Thy Children": Transcendent Modernity in British Urban Reconstruction. 8. Privet: Theologies of Privacy in Some Modernist Urbanism. 9. Rudolf Schwarz, the Hochstadt and the Reconstruction of Cologne. Bibliography. Index.