Modern Architectural Theory: A Historical Survey, 1673–1968

by Harry Francis Mallgrave

• ISBN13: 9780521130486
• ISBN10: 0521130484
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-07-13
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Modern Architectural Theory is the first book to provide a comprehensive survey of architectural theorem, primarily in Europe and the United States, during three centuries of development. In this synthetic overview, Harry Mallgrave contextualizes architectural discourse within its social and political atmosphere. He explores the philosophical and conceptual evolution of its ideas, the relation of theory to the practice of building, and most importantly, the words of the architects themselves as they contentiously shaped their particular niche of Western civilization. He also examines the compelling currents of French rationalist and British empirical thought, the radical reformation of theory during the Enlightenment, the intellectual ambition and historicist debates of the nineteenth century, and the distinctive varieties of modern theory in the twentieth century up to the profound social upheaval of the 1960s. Modern Architectural Theory challenges many assumptions about architectural modernism and uncovers many new dimensions of the debates about modernism.

Table of Contents

Prelude

The enlightenment and neoclassical theory

British theory in the eighteenth century

Neoclassicism and historicism

The rise of German theory

Competing directions at midcentury

Historicism in the United States

The arts and crafts movement

Excursus on a few of the conceptual foundations of twentieth-century German modernism

Modernism 1889-1914

European modernism 1917-1933

American modernism 1917-1934

Depression, war, and aftermath 1934-1958

Challenges to modernism in Europe 1959-1967

Challenges to modernism in America

Epilogue

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