The Ambiguous Legacy of Socialist Modernist Architecture in Central and Eastern Europe PDF Download

Author: Mariusz Sokołowicz
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781003299172
Category : Architecture and society
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"This book examines the unique socialist-modernist architecture built in the 20th century in Central and Eastern Europe, as a source of heritage and of existing and potential value for present and future generations. Due to the historical context in which it was created, such architecture remains ambiguous. On the one hand, the wider public associates it with the legacy of the unpleasant period of the real socialist economic regime. Yet, on the other hand, it is also a manifestation of social modernization and promotion of a significant proportion of the population. The book focuses particularly on concrete heritage, a legacy of modernist architecture in Central and Eastern Europe, and it was this material that enabled their rebuilding after World War II and modernization during the following decades. The authors search for the value of modernist architecture and using case studies from Poland, Bulgaria, Northern Macedonia, Lithuania and Slovenia, verify to what extent this heritage is embedded in the local socio-economic milieu and becomes a basis for creating new values. They argue that the challenge is to change the ways we think about heritage, from looking at it from the point of view of a single monument, to thinking in terms of a place with its own character and identity that builds its relation to history and its embeddedness in the local space. Furthermore, they propose that preservation of existing concrete structures and adapting them to modern needs is of great importance for sustainability. With increasing awareness of the issue of preserving post-war architectural heritage and the strategies of dissonant heritage management, this multidisciplinary study will be of interest to architecture historians, conservators, heritage economists, urban planners and architects"--

Author: Mariusz E. Sokołowicz
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000875512
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
This book examines the unique socialist-modernist architecture built in the twentieth century in Central and Eastern Europe as a source of heritage and of existing and potential value for the present and future generations. Due to the historical context in which it was created, such architecture remains ambiguous. On the one hand, the wider public associates it with the legacy of the unpleasant period of the real socialist economic regime. Yet, on the other hand, it is also a manifestation of social modernization and the promotion of a significant proportion of the population. This book focuses particularly on concrete heritage, a legacy of modernist architecture in Central and Eastern Europe, and it was this material that enabled their rebuilding after World War II and modernization during the following decades. The authors search for the value of modernist architecture and using case studies from Poland, Bulgaria, Northern Macedonia, Lithuania and Slovenia verify to what extent this heritage is embedded in the local socio-economic milieu and becomes a basis for creating new values. They argue that the challenge is to change the ways we think about heritage, from looking at it from the point of view of a single monument to thinking in terms of a place with its own character and identity that builds its relation to history and its embeddedness in the local space. Furthermore, they propose that the preservation of existing concrete structures and adapting them to modern needs is of great importance for sustainability. With increasing awareness of the issue of preserving post-war architectural heritage and the strategies of dissonant heritage management, this multidisciplinary study will be of interest to architecture historians, conservators, heritage economists, urban planners and architects.

Author: Ke Song
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000865681
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
This book investigates the architectural history of China in the Mao era (1949–1976), focusing on the rise of modernism in the last seven years of the Cultural Revolution from 1969 to 1976. It highlights the new architecture of this period, exemplified by three clusters of buildings for foreign affairs, namely buildings for foreign diplomacy in Beijing, buildings for foreign trade in Guangzhou and China’s foreign aid projects overseas. The emergence of new architecture in the early 1970s is closely associated with China’s political and diplomatic shift of the time, from a radical emphasis on ideological struggle to a dynamic balance between leftist ideology and pragmatic concerns. In this context, China’s relations with the West quickly improved, culminating with American president Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. The increasing foreign affairs brought new opportunities to Chinese architects who referenced both Western modernism and Chinese architectural traditions to create a new version of Chinese modernism. The book brings dimensions of form, politics and knowledge to the analysis of architecture, to construct an understanding of architectural design as an aesthetic, political and intellectual practice. Modernism in Late-Mao China will be an enriching and useful reference for students and scholars who are interested in the global architectural history of the twentieth century, especially Cold War modernism.

Author: Danyal Ahmed
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000965708
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
A History of Artificially Intelligent Architecture: Case Studies from the USA, UK, Europe and Japan, 1949-1987 provides a comprehensive survey of architectural projects exhibiting intelligence since the Late First Century right up to the present day. Tracing the social, scientific and technological developments, this book analyses case studies from both conceived and executed architectural projects by Architects and Cyberneticians from the United States, United Kingdom, Europe and Japan from 1949-87. From the Late First Century through to the Seventeenth Century, the scientific endeavors of the Hero of Alexandria, Ramon Llull, Paracelsus, René Descartes, Jacques de Vaucanson, Pierre Jacquet-Droz, and Charles Babbage have been presented in which they attempted to review, analyse and conclude the notion of artificial intelligence. Coming to the Twenty-First Century and witnessing a period, particularly from 1949-87, where nothing had been constant, Architects and Cyberneticians whose architectural projects attempted to simulate intelligence include Cedric Price, Richard Saul Wurman, Nicholas Negroponte, Kenzo Tange, Arata Isozaki, Charles Eames, Ezra D. Ehrenkrantz, Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano, and Gordon Pask respectively. This book asks: How have Polymaths, Architects and Cyberneticians simulated artificial intelligence in their scientific/architectural projects? Is it possible to define intelligence purely based on the history of architecture? Or, on a more extensive level, is it possible to view artificial intelligence originating from the history of architecture instead of computational paradigm? The transdisciplinarity of the book makes it of interest to researchers and students of technologically advanced architecture’s history, theory, and criticism, artificial intelligence, cybernetics, information and communications, urban and sustainable design, ergonomics, computer applications, and digital design and fabrication.

Author: Gary Huafan He
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000888894
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
This project is born out of similar questions and discussions on the topic of organicism emergent from two critical strands regarding the discourse of organic self-generation: one dealing with the problem of stopping in the design processes in history, and the other with the organic legacy of style in the nineteenth century as a preeminent form of aesthetic ideology. The epistemologies of self-generation outlined by enlightenment and critical philosophy provided the model for the discursive formations of modern urban planning and architecture. The form of the organism was thought to calibrate modernism’s infinite extension. The architectural organicism of today does not take on the language of the biological sciences, as they did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but rather the image of complex systems, be they computational/informational, geo/ecological, or even ontological/aesthetic ‘networks’. What is retained from the modernity of yesterday is the ideology of endless self-generation. Revisiting such a topic feels relevant now, in a time when the idea of endless generation is rendered more suspect than ever, amid an ever increasing speed and complexity of artificial intelligence (AI) networks. The essays collected in this book offer a variety of critiques of the modernist idea of endless growth in the fields of architecture, literature, philosophy, and the history of science. They range in scope from theoretical and speculative to analytic and critical and from studies of the history of modernity to reflections of our contemporary world. Far from advocating a return to the romantic forms of nineteenth-century naturphilosophie, this project focuses on probing organicism for new forms of critique and emergent subjectivities in a contemporary, 'post'-pandemic constellation of neo-naturalism in design, climate change, complex systems, and information networks. This book will be of interest to a broad range of researchers and professionals in architecture and art history, historians of science, visual artists, and scholars in the humanities more generally.

Author: Pierangelo Marco Scravaglieri
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100096860X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Liquid Architecture challenges the idea of architecture as a fixed, inert container and reconceptualises it as a body whose boundaries are rather blurred and ever-changing. This book moves away from form as the primary driver of spatial protocols and explores what the built environment might look like when viewed through the lenses of a ‘wet ontology’ that is attentive to fluidity, flows and territorial dynamism. A reconfiguration of architectural materials and authorship is thus considered, leading, in turn, to an exploration of the ethical dimensions of co-designing with natural systems (of various viscosities) through liquid paradigms. The book examines a set of principles for practice-led discoveries that incorporate hybrid, mixed media with the author’s intersubjective relationship with liquid matter. Drawing from qualitative-based analytical investigation models, the text allows comprehension of the liquid phenomena via material contextualisation of an ever-becoming research setting. Through a practical and theoretical engagement with the ontology of liquids, the reader is exposed to a range of design-led experiments and creative propositions, visualisation systems, construction, and testing of physical models that collectively translate into a series of novel insights for architectural agendas. This book will be of interest to architecture and design research students and academics because it advocates the need for a more symbiotic and resilient approach to natural systems, which could benefit from the integration of regenerating material flows into our buildings and urban settlements.

Author: Gevork Hartoonian
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000907457
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This edited collection explores the visibility of modernization in architecture produced in different capitalist regions across the world and provides readers with a historico-theoretical and historico-geographical discussion. Focusing on a particular building type, an influential architect’s work, as well as relevant texts and documents, each chapter addresses the many facets of "delay" which are central to the problematization of capitalism’s progressive dissemination of technological and aesthetic regimes of modernism. This collection underlines the centrality of temporality for a critical understanding of colonialism, modernism, and capitalism. The book is primarily concerned with the historical timeline, the tangential point when a nation enters modernization processes. In exploring modernism in diverse regions such as East Asia, Pacific, Eastern Europe, and Iran, each chapter addresses the historiographic and architectonic unfolding of modernization beyond the western hemisphere. The exploration of these diverse case-studies will be of interest to students of architecture and researchers working on the collision of temporalities and the subject's critical importance for different country’s built-environments.

Author: Lilian Chee
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317068645
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Architecture and Affect is motivated by two questions: Why does dismissed affective evidence trouble us? What would it mean for architecture to assemble such discrepant evidence into its discourse? Arguing that the persistent refrains of lived affect dwell in architecture, this book traces such refrains to a concept of architecture wedged in the middle ground—jammed amidst life, things and events. Rather than being aloof from its surrounds, architecture-in-the-midst challenges an autonomous epistemology. Beyond accounting for the vivid but excluded, this book develops a frame and a disposition for thinking critically about, speculatively through, and being grounded by, encounter. Examining affect through a constellation of spaces in contemporary Singapore, it details architecture’s uneasy but inextricable relationship with key subjects relegated to the incommensurate, the peripheral, the scenic and the decorative. The outcome is a politicized architectural discourse simultaneously grounded and speculative; bridging depth and intuition, thinking and feeling.

Author: Nicholas Coetzer
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100089407X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Architects care. It is foundational and germane to the discipline and practice of architecture. This book charts the way the Arts and Crafts Movement established the moral ethos of ‘an architecture of care’ that not only remains embedded in current discourse and practice but also that is being given a more vocal presence in our climate-crisis and social justice world. By way of ‘genealogical strands’ the book charts the origin of ‘architecture of care’ ideas in the Arts and Crafts Movement and their impact on the ‘other progeny’ architectural projects in South Africa over the past hundred years. These range from the translation of inglenooks into an armature architecture of ‘Dignified Places’ in Cape Town’s townships to the ethos of ‘upliftment’ and care that translates from Octavia Hill through to ‘correcting’ building regulations and eventually finding a less moralising and more transformative impact in the ‘Hostels to Homes’ project. The birth of design through context and climate in the Arts and Crafts Movement is demonstrated by the shift in South African houses from boxy cottages to solar- and nature-oriented ribbon plans as demonstrated through the work of Helmut Stauch and Norman Eaton. The dislocation of Arts and Crafts ideas to the Cape also demonstrated a limit to the valorising of vernacular architecture and its ‘against-globalization’ building materials whereby English architects promoted Cape Dutch settler architecture and denigrated African vernacular architecture. As a final ‘genealogical strand,’ the book demonstrates the coherence of moral instrumentality with the animism and affects potential of handmade buildings. Written for academics, students and researchers interested in architectural history, it is an eye-opening investigation into the role of architecture in society.

Author: Pilar Maria Guerrieri
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000898601
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
This book seeks to provide an alternative post-Western perspective to the history of contemporary architecture. It puts forward detailed critical analyses of various areas of the world, including Europe, Latin America, Africa, China, Australia, India and Japan, where particular movements of architecture have developed as active ‘political acts’. The authors focus on a broad spectrum of countries, architectures and architects that have developed a design approach closely linked to the building context. The concept of context is broad and includes various economic, social, cultural, political and natural aspects. In all cases, the architects selected in this book have chosen to view context as an opportunity. However, each architect has considered certain specific aspects of context: some have been very attentive to the social context, others to material aspects or typological issues, and still others to aspects related to political visions or economic factors. The analysis critically highlights interesting, creative and respectful design approaches towards local conditions, such as sustainability in Nordic Europe, climate-conscious design in Africa, and the ‘bottom-up’ sensitivity of India. The book’s main aim is to retrace, through both theoretical arguments and case studies, the debate that focuses on politics and the environment. Thanks to its valuable examples, this book strives to make a conscious contribution to establishing a bulwark against the current ‘flattening-out’ processes that architecture is experiencing. This book will be of relevance to researchers, teachers and students interested in the history of architecture, architecture and planning, and postcolonial studies.