The future of architecture since 1889 : a worldwide history /

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction Architecture's expanded field -- Sheds to rails: the dominion of steel -- The search for modern form -- Domestic innovation and tectonic expression -- America rediscovered, tall and wide -- The challenge of the metropolis -- New production, new aesthetic -- In search of a language: from classicism to Cubism -- The Great War and its side effects -- Expressionism in Weimar Germany and the Netherlands -- Return to order in Paris -- Dada, De Stijl, and Mies; from subversiveness to elementarism -- Architectural education in turmoil -- Architecture and revolution in Russia -- The architecture of social reform -- Internationalization, its networks and spectacles -- Futurism and Rationalism in Fascist Italy -- The spectrum of classicisms and traditionalisms -- North American modernities -- Functionalism and machine aesthetics -- Modern languages conquer the world -- Colonial experiences and new nationalisms -- Architecture of a total war -- Tabula rasa to horror vacui: reconstruction and renaissance -- The fatal crisis of the Modern Movement, and the alternatives -- Le Corbusier reinvented and reinterpreted -- The shape of American hegemony -- Repression and diffusion of modernism -- Toward new utopias -- Between elitism and populism: alternative architecture -- After 1968 architecture for the city -- The postmodern season -- From regionalism to critical internationalism -- tneo-Futurist optimism of high-tech -- Architecture's outer boundaries -- Vanishing points.

Architecture, a discipline both constructive and creative, is by necessity concerned with the future. At the same time, architects are constantly looking to the past in search of buildings and patterns that resonate with their own projects. This tension is at the heart of the architectural developments of the twentieth century a period of rapid technological and social change. massive population growth and an unprecedented surge in building, but also one in which historical and vernacular concepts played a key role, leading to resurgences of classical and traditional forms. In looking back over this period, author Jean-Louis Cohen offers a history that starts with the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889, and which gives a complete background by which we can understand the developments of the early twenty-first century. It does not offer a single, linear narrative of development, but a complex exploration of both modernity and continuity. Worldwide in scope, this authoritative account discusses the work of both well-known masters and previously neglected but significant designers, and it clarifies the effects of events as diverse as world wars, movements in art and culture, and individual architects on the discipline. It contains hundreds of drawings and photographs, as well as publications, portraits, diagrams, film stills and more, placing the radical developments in architecture in this period in a larger context that includes art, technology, urbanism and critical theory. Students coming to this information for the first time will find a text that is articulate and comprehensive, and readers more familiar with the time period will encounter in its pages new buildings, connections and ideas. The Future of Architecture Since 1889: A Worldwide History clearly and comprehensively presents the immediate history of the built environment that we inhabit today.