Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural ModernismArchitecture, at least since the beginning of the twentieth century, has suspendedhistorical references in favor of universalized abstraction. In the decades after the Second WorldWar, when architectural historians began to assess the legacy of the avant-gardes in order toconstruct a coherent narrative of modernism's development, they were inevitably influenced bycontemporary concerns. In Histories of the Immediate Present, Anthony Vidler examines the work offour historians of architectural modernism and the ways in which their histories were constructed asmore or less overt programs for the theory and practice of design in a contemporary context. Vidlerlooks at the historical approaches of Emil Kaufmann, Colin Rowe, Reyner Banham, and Manfredo Tafuri,and the specific versions of modernism advanced by their historical narratives. Vidler shows thatthe modernism conceived by Kaufmann was, like the late Enlightenment projects he revered, one ofpure, geometrical forms and elemental composition; that of Rowe saw mannerist ambiguity andcomplexity in contemporary design; Banham's modernism took its cue from the aspirations of thefuturists; and the "Renaissance modernism" of Tafuri found its source in the divisionbetween the technical experimentation of Brunelleschi and the cultural nostalgia of Alberti.Vidler's investigation demonstrates the inevitable collusion between history and design thatpervades all modern architectural discourse--and has given rise to some of the most interestingarchitectual experiments of the postwar period. Anthony Vidler is Dean and Professor of the Irwin S.Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union, New York. He is the author of Warped Space: Art,Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (2000), The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the ModernUnhomely (1992), both published by The MIT Press, and other books. |
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Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism Anthony Vidler Limited preview - 2008 |