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concern for profitability and universality. Innovation, however, is not the same as architecture. One might point out that certain generations of architectural modernism fall into the same trap of mechanistic and homogenised mass solutions, yet this is certainly not the central thrust of architectural training, which offers something very different to replicable product design. Architects are meant to design for a particular client, paying detailed attention to the specifics of a site
modernism. Computers would, it was argued, allow the design capabilities and expertise of professionals to be transferred to the popular masses ( Turner, 2006 ). In the mid 1970s, the architect Nicholas Negroponte 11 sought to eliminate professional privilege by facilitating public participation and ownership of the architectural design process through computer programming. The intention was to create ‘soft architectural machines’ that could translate human imperfections, anxieties and emotions into the rich architectural designs of a ‘new
This book highlights sport as a key inspiration for an international range of modernist artists. With sport attracting large crowds, being written about in the press, filmed and broadcast, and with its top stars enjoying celebrity status, sport has claims to be the most pervasive cultural form of the early twentieth century.
Modernist artists recognised sport’s importance in their writings and production. This book examines a diverse set of paintings, photographic works, films, buildings, and writings from artists in France, Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union to establish the international appeal of the theme while acknowledging local and stylistic differences in its interpretation. From the fascination with the racing cyclist in paintings by Umberto Boccioni, Lyonel Feininger and Jean Metzinger, to the designs for stadiums in fascist Italy and the Soviet Union, the works examined are compelling both in visual and ideological terms.
Encompassing studies of many avant-garde movements, including Italian futurism, cubism, German expressionism, Le Corbusier’s architecture, Soviet constructivism, Italian rationalism and the Bauhaus, this book interrogates the ways in which sport and modernism interconnect.
This is the first interdisciplinary exploration of machine culture in Italian futurism after the First World War. The machine was a primary concern for the futuristi. As well as being a material tool in the factory it was a social and political agent, an aesthetic emblem, a metonymy of modernity and international circulation and a living symbol of past crafts and technologies. Exploring literature, the visual and performing arts, photography, music and film, the book uses the lens of European machine culture to elucidate the work of a broad set of artists and practitioners, including Censi, Depero, Marinetti, Munari and Prampolini. The machine emerges here as an archaeology of technology in modernity: the time machine of futurism.
Regarding the real: cinema, documentary, and the visual arts develops an approach to the study of documentary film focussing on its aesthetic and cultural relations to the modern visual arts, especially: animation, assemblage, photography, painting, and architecture. In particular, it examines how documentary practices have often incorporated methods and expressive techniques derived from these art forms. Combining close analysis with cultural history, the book re-assesses the influence of the modern visual arts in subverting the structures of realism typically associated with documentary film, and considers the work of figures whose preferred film language is associative, and fragmentary, and for whom the documentary remains an open form, an unstable expressive phenomenon that at its best interrogates its own narratives, and intentions. In the course of its discussion, the book charts a path that leads from Len Lye to Hiroshi Teshigahara, and includes along the way figures such as Joseph Cornell, Johan van der Keuken, William Klein, Jean-Luc Godard, Jonas Mekas, Raymond Depardon.
and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli’ noted by Simmel in his 1903 essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’.5 Whereas Nordau finds the fragmentation 2 Cf. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1880–1930 (Sussex: Harvester, 1978), 47; Douwe Fokkema and Elrud Ibsch, Modernist Conjectures: A Mainstream in European Literature, 1910–1940 (London: C. Hurst & Company, 1987), 43. 3 Max Nordau, Degeneration (1892) (New York: H. Fertig, 1968 [1895, 1892]), 536; cited in Richard Lehan, The City in Literature: An
influence of their European protagonists. For, although some Western thinkers and artists in the late nineteenth century displayed an anti-industrial fascination with Indian village life, very few were guided by an anti-colonialist mindset. Some, like Ruskin, were even able to reconcile a pronounced imperialism with their idealisation of pre-industrial ways of life. In contrast, some of the protagonists of Indian modernism expressed similar sentiments regarding urban versus village culture, industry versus handicrafts
England and France, and has different but related manifestations in other countries. Towards the latter half of the nineteenth century a new aesthetic, predominantly European in its earlier incarnations, reacts against Realism and produces what is now collectively termed ‘modernism’. What next? Inevitably, perhaps, modernism in turn becomes superseded. Again, it depends from which country you view these events, but in general it is thought that modernism is ‘exhausted’ by the 1930s, and that decade sees the ‘high modernism’ of works like Finnegans Wake (1939) as a
of architecture between 1880 and 1914. The School also transformed the shape of the house and can rightly be thought of as an important ingredient in the rise of international modernism in Europe. 40 Thus in 1893, the organisers of the Columbian had a great deal of acclaimed expertise to tap for the construction of their site. Daniel Burnham, a leading light in the Chicago school, was made chairman
Database, the Foxe Project or the ODNB. There is a concern that the normal critical faculties of academics have been suspended when faced with glossy and well-organized databases of this kind: it is as well to remember that a database of any kind is only as good as the source materials upon which it draws, and the organization and accessibility of the data. -Isms New -isms became prominent from the 1950s onwards: modernism, postmodernism, deconstructionism, feminism and receptionism being five of the most important for our subject. The modernist trend emerged in the