Tracing Modernity

Manifestations of the Modern in Architecture and the City

Edited by Christian Hermansen, Mari Hvattum

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About the Book

From the seventeenth century until today, the 'modern' has served as a key category by which to understand an ever-changing present. Art and architecture have played a key role in this pursuit as the means by which the modern was to manifest itself. The essays in this new anthology trace the 'modern' project through its many forms in order to understand contemporary culture in a deeper sense than discussions of 'modernism' and 'post-modernism' usually offer. Drawing on architectural and urban history as well as philosophy and sociology, the book outlines the complex and conflicting roots of modernity by tracing its manifestations in architecture and the city.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Modernity 1. Analysing Modernity 2. What Moderniam Was: Art, Progress and Avant-Garde 3. Modernity and Architecture 4. Modernity and the Uses of History: Understanding Classical Architecture from Botticher to Warberg 5. Projecting Modern Culture: 'Aesthetic Fundamentalism' and Modern Architecture 6. Modernity and the Question of Representation Part 2: Architecture 7. 'How is it that there is no Modern Style of Architrecture?' 'Greek' Thomson versus Gilbert Scott 8. 'A Complete and Universal Collection': Gottfried Semper and the Great Exhibition 9. The Interior as Aesthetic Refuge: Edmond de Goncourt's La Maison d'un Artiste 10. Timely Untimeliness? Architectural Modernism and the Idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk 11. Le Corbusier and the Restorative Fragment at the Swiss Pavilion 12. The Concrete Memory of Modernity: Excerpts from a Moscow Diary Part 3: The City 13. Lidefonso Cerda and Modernity 14. 'To Knock Fire out of Men' Forging Modernity in Glasgow 15. The Expressionist Utopia 16. Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project: A Prehistory of Modernity 17. Impromptus of a Great City: Siegfried Kracauer's Strassen in Berlin Und Anderswo 18. Orpheus in Hollywood: Sigfried Kracauer's Offenbach Film