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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 is about Ford Madox Ford, a hero of the modernist literary revolution. Ford is a fascinating and fundamental figure of the time; not only because, as a friend and critic of Ezra Pound and Joseph Conrad, editor of the English Review and author of The Good Soldier, he shaped the development of literary modernism. But, as the grandson of Ford Madox Brown and son of a German music critic, he also manifested formative links with mainland European culture and the visual arts. In Ford there is the chance to explore continuity in artistic life at the turn of the last century, as well as the more commonly identified pattern of crisis in the time. The argument throughout the book is that modernism possesses more than one face. Setting Ford in his cultural and historical context, the opening chapter debates the concept of fragmentation in modernism; later chapters discuss the notion of the personal narrative, and war writing. Ford's literary technique is studied comparatively and plot summaries of his major books (The Good Soldier and Parade's End) are provided, as is a brief biography.
imaginary but palpable distended and aggrandizing West/Europe as modernity – for all those awaiting its second coming in prior places, anachronistic spaces, lagging in time. In artistic, intellectual, and aesthetic arenas, modernism(s) in South Asia have variously, often critically, engaged with these projections and presuppositions: but they have also been unable to easily escape
passage of the modern movement to that of Attila, sweeping across Europe.23 It had left many of its key figures grasping at fragments. Writing in 1918, Ford tried to reassemble the ‘fragments’ that were coming into his mind, ‘as in a cubist picture’, in narrative.24 His most famous narrator struggles to give an 4 Fragmenting modernism ‘all-round impression’ as he tortuously and retrospectively constructs multiple examples of the ‘minutest fragment’ of the truth.25 Woolf, too, in Orlando, tries to work with the ‘thousand odd, disconnected fragments’ thrown up by
between America and Europe that was to influence the course of culture and politics for the rest of the twentieth century. However, assessments of Eliot’s role as poet and critic have been heavily coloured by his own selfrepresentation as an intellectual in the European tradition. What we wish to argue here is that Eliot’s ambivalence concerning the American dimension of his identity is significant for any study of transatlantic exchanges, especially in relation to Modernism and the Gothic. Eliot’s embrace of European high culture (particularly the French symbolist
As Spanos makes clear, however, postmodernism’s ‘strategy of decomposition’ 4 that must strip ‘its audience of positivized fugitives of their protective garments of rational explanation’ 5 is not new. As was the case with Olson, Spanos’s postmodernism is, in fact, not post-anything but typological. He sees signs of the postmodern resistance to ‘the Western structure of consciousness’ in modernism and finds a fully developed postmodern impulse throughout the history of Western literature – in, for instance
moments in the genre’s past, occasions when and where its conventions were contested from within particular disciplines. Such contestation has often involved reconceptualising the case study’s epistemological foundations. This volume has taken the reader on a transcontinental journey from the imperial world of fin-desiècle Central Europe and the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the inter-war metropolises of Weimar Germany, and to the USA in the post-war years. At all of these moments, and in all of these contexts, the case study has been evolving; fostering transformation
The major part of this book project was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 700913.
This book is about two distinct but related professional cultures in late Soviet
Russia that were concerned with material objects: industrial design and
decorative art. The Russian avant-garde of the 1920s is broadly recognised to
have been Russia’s first truly original contribution to world culture. In
contrast, Soviet design of the post-war period is often dismissed as hackwork
and plagiarism that resulted in a shabby world of commodities. This book
identifies the second historical attempt at creating a powerful alternative to
capitalist commodities in the Cold War era. It offers a new perspective on the
history of Soviet material culture by focusing on the notion of the ‘comradely
object’ as an agent of progressive social relations that state-sponsored Soviet
design inherited from the avant-garde. It introduces a shared history of
domestic objects, handmade as well as machine-made, mass-produced as well as
unique, utilitarian as well as challenging the conventional notion of utility.
Situated at the intersection of intellectual history, social history and
material culture studies, this book elucidates the complexities and
contradictions of Soviet design that echoed international tendencies of the late
twentieth century. The book is addressed to design historians, art historians,
scholars of material culture, historians of Russia and the USSR, as well as
museum and gallery curators, artists and designers, and the broader public
interested in modern aesthetics, art and design, and/or the legacy of socialist
regimes.
that the developmental idea of a supersession of the past is crucial to modern imaginaries. This is true of academic assumption and everyday understanding, and also underlies the mutual articulations of modernity, modernization, and modernism. Such splitting of the past from the present is simultaneously temporal and spatial. Here the singular temporal trajectory and the exclusive spatial location of