German Architectural Theory and the Search for Modern Identity

German Architectural Theory and the Search for Modern Identity
Title German Architectural Theory and the Search for Modern Identity PDF eBook
Author Mitchell Schwarzer
Publisher
Pages 364
Release 1995
Genre Architecture
ISBN 9780521481502

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This book presents for the first time in English an overview of the theoretical debates on architecture in nineteenth-century Austria and Germany. Drawing on a vast number of writings by architects, historians, philosophers and critics, Mitchell Schwarzer offers an exhaustive history of the principal debates on style, industry, nationalism, iron technology, and artistic expression, all of which inform modern architecture. He argues that the history of architecture in the modern era cannot be explained according to the simple evolution or progression of structural, functional, or artistic forces. Rather, he establishes modernity as a series of debates on the parameters of architectural knowledge itself and the identity of the architectural profession in a rapidly industrialising world. Describing theory through its conflicts and unresolved questions, Schwarzer uncovers the complex nature of modern pluralism, one that is still relevant in the late twentieth century.

Tracing Modernity

Tracing Modernity
Title Tracing Modernity PDF eBook
Author Mari Hvattum
Publisher Routledge
Pages 359
Release 2004-08-02
Genre Architecture
ISBN 1134406398

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First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Meaning of Modern Architecture

The Meaning of Modern Architecture
Title The Meaning of Modern Architecture PDF eBook
Author Hans Rudolf Morgenthaler
Publisher Routledge
Pages 197
Release 2016-03-09
Genre Architecture
ISBN 1317024303

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Using empathy, as established by the Vienna School of Art History, complemented by insights on how the mind processes visual stimuli, as demonstrated by late 19th-century psychologists and art theorists, this book puts forward an innovative interpretative method of decoding the forms and spaces of Modern buildings. This method was first developed as scholars realized that the new abstract art appearing needed to be analysed differently than the previous figurative works. Since architecture experienced a similar development in the 1920s and 30s, this book argues that the empathetic method can also be used in architectural interpretation. While most existing scholarship tends to focus on formal and functional analysis, this book proposes that Modern architecture is too diverse to be reduced to a few common formal or ornamental features. Instead, by relying on the viewer’s innate psycho-physiological perceptive abilities, sensual and intuitive understandings of composition, form, and space are emphasized. These aspects are especially significant because Modern Architecture lacks the traditional stylistic signs. Including building analyses, it shows how, by visually reducing cubical forms and spaces to linear configurations, the exteriors and interiors of Modern buildings can be interpreted via human perceptive abilities as dynamic movement systems commensurate with the new industrial transportation age. This reveals an inner necessity these buildings express about themselves and their culture, rather than just an explanation of how they are assembled and how they should be used. The case studies highlight the contrasts between buildings designed by different architects, rather than concentrating on the few features that relate them to the zeitgeist. It analyses the buildings directly as the objects of study, not indirectly, as designs filtered through a philosophical or theoretical discourse. The book demonstrates that, with technology and science affecting culture

Antiquity on Display

Antiquity on Display
Title Antiquity on Display PDF eBook
Author Can Bilsel
Publisher Oxford University Press
Pages 310
Release 2012-07-19
Genre Architecture
ISBN 0199570558

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"Antiquity on Display" offers an insight into the history of the imaginative reproductions of architecture housed in Berlin's Pergamon Museum and the shifting regimes of the authentic in museum displays from the 19th century to the present.

German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic

German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic
Title German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic PDF eBook
Author John M. Efron
Publisher Princeton University Press
Pages 352
Release 2019-05-28
Genre History
ISBN 0691192758

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In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as German Jews struggled for legal emancipation and social acceptance, they also embarked on a program of cultural renewal, two key dimensions of which were distancing themselves from their fellow Ashkenazim in Poland and giving a special place to the Sephardim of medieval Spain. Where they saw Ashkenazic Jewry as insular and backward, a result of Christian persecution, they depicted the Sephardim as worldly, morally and intellectually superior, and beautiful, products of the tolerant Muslim environment in which they lived. In this elegantly written book, John Efron looks in depth at the special allure Sephardic aesthetics held for German Jewry. Efron examines how German Jews idealized the sound of Sephardic Hebrew and the Sephardim's physical and moral beauty, and shows how the allure of the Sephardic found expression in neo-Moorish synagogue architecture, historical novels, and romanticized depictions of Sephardic history. He argues that the shapers of German-Jewish culture imagined medieval Iberian Jewry as an exemplary Jewish community, bound by tradition yet fully at home in the dominant culture of Muslim Spain. Efron argues that the myth of Sephardic superiority was actually an expression of withering self-critique by German Jews who, by seeking to transform Ashkenazic culture and win the acceptance of German society, hoped to enter their own golden age. Stimulating and provocative, this book demonstrates how the goal of this aesthetic self-refashioning was not assimilation but rather the creation of a new form of German-Jewish identity inspired by Sephardic beauty.

German Cities and Bourgeois Modernism, 1890-1924

German Cities and Bourgeois Modernism, 1890-1924
Title German Cities and Bourgeois Modernism, 1890-1924 PDF eBook
Author Maiken Umbach
Publisher OUP Oxford
Pages 272
Release 2009-06-25
Genre History
ISBN 0191570893

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This is a study of a distinctive brand of modernism that first emerged in late nineteenth-century Germany and remained influential throughout the inter-war years and beyond. Its supporters saw themselves as a new elite, ideally placed to tackle the many challenges facing the young and rapidly industrializing German nation-state. They defined themselves as bourgeois, and acted as self-appointed champions of a modern consciousness. Focusing on figures such as Hermann Muthesius, Fritz Schumacher, and Karl-Ernst Osthaus, and the activities of the Deutscher Werkbund and other networks of bourgeois designers, writers, and 'experts', this book shows how bourgeois modernism shaped the infrastructure of social and political life in early twentieth-century Germany. Bourgeois modernism exercised its power not so much in the realm of ideas, but by transforming the physical environment of German cities, from domestic interiors, via consumer objects, to urban and regional planning. Drawing on a detailed analysis of key material sites of bourgeois modernism, and interpreting them in conjunction with written sources, this study offers new insights into the history of the bourgeois mindset and its operations in the private and public realms. Thematic chapters examine leitmotifs such as the sense of locality and place, the sense of history and time, and the sense of nature and culture. Yet for all its self-conscious progressivism, German bourgeois modernism was not an inevitable precursor of neo-liberal global capitalism. It remained a hotly contested historical construct, which was constantly re-defined in different geographical and political settings.

Architecture and the Late Ottoman Historical Imaginary

Architecture and the Late Ottoman Historical Imaginary
Title Architecture and the Late Ottoman Historical Imaginary PDF eBook
Author AhmetA. Ersoy
Publisher Routledge
Pages 517
Release 2017-07-05
Genre Art
ISBN 1351576003

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While European eclecticism is examined as a critical and experimental moment in western art history, little research has been conducted to provide an intellectual depth of field to the historicist pursuits of late Ottoman architects as they maneuvered through the nineteenth century?s vast inventory of available styles and embarked on a revivalist/Orientalist program they identified as the ?Ottoman Renaissance.? Ahmet A. Ersoy?s book examines the complex historicist discourse underlying this belated ?renaissance? through a close reading of a text conceived as the movement?s canonizing manifesto: the Usul-i Mi?mari-i ?Osmani [The Fundamentals of Ottoman Architecture] (Istanbul, 1873). In its translocal, cross-disciplinary scope, Ersoy?s work explores the creative ways in which the Ottoman authors straddled the art-historical mainstream and their new, self-orientalizing aesthetics of locality. The study reveals how Orientalism was embraced by its very objects, the self-styled ?Orientals? of the modern world, as a marker of authenticity, and a strategically located aesthetic tool to project universally recognizable images of cultural difference. Rejecting the lesser, subsidiary status ascribed to non-western Orientalisms, Ersoy?s work contributes to recent, post-Saidian directions in the study of cultural representation that resituate the field of Orientalism beyond its polaristic core, recognizing its cross-cultural potential as a polyvalent discourse.