Modern Architectural Theory: A Historical Survey, 1673–1968

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Cambridge University Press, 2009 M07 13
Modern Architectural Theory is the first book to provide a comprehensive survey of architectural theory, primarily in Europe and the United States, during three centuries of development. In this synthetic overview, Harry Mallgrave examines architectural discourse within its social and political context. He explores the philosophical and conceptual evolution of its ideas, discusses the relation of theory to the practice of building, and, most importantly, considers the words of the architects themselves, as they contentiously shaped Western architecture. He also examines the compelling currents of French rationalist and British empiricist thought, radical reformation of the theory during the Enlightenment, the intellectual ambitions 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.
 

Contents

Competing Directions at Midcentury
114
Historicism in the United States
139
Modernism 18891914
204
European Modernism 19171933
235
American Modernism 19171934
279
Depression War and Aftermath 19341958
305
Challenges to Modernism in America
380
Epilogue
404
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About the author (2009)

Harry Mallgrave is Associate Professor of History and Theory at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. His 1996 book Gottfried Semper: Architect of the Nineteenth Century was awarded the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award by the Society of Architectural Historians.

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