Knowledge, Comprehension, Analysis, Evaluation
The course Variant Modernism examines the modernperiod in architecture and the city. Pursuing the beginnings of modern ideas and practices in architecture and urbanism, the course includes some short references at the early modernity of the 18th and 19th century, in order to focus on the modern condition, as it was developed by the avant-garde movements in architecture and urbanism of the 20th century.
The course aims at deepening the understanding of history and theory of modern architecture by intensifying the critical thinking and historical sense of the students. Therefore, during the courses we question the definite historical narrative of modern architecture, by promoting alternative considerations and equivocal meanings in the history of modern architecture and urban theories. The course follows a series of presentations under specific topics, but its seminal structure is based on the students’ active participation.
In the series of lessons, particular tendencies of 20th century’s modern movements are examined, in the overall context and specific conditions that they flourished. Following that generic viewpoint, variants of modern architecture and the city are expounded, in order to find and analyse new correlations between different arts and disciplines of modernity.
- Banham, Reyner, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, London: Architectural Press, 1960.
- Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, H.Eiland/K.McLaughlin(trans.), Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard Univ. Press, 2002.
- Colomina, Beatriz, Privacy and publicity: modern architecture as mass media, Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1994.
- Curtis, J.R.William, Modern Architecture since 1900,London/NY: Phaidon Press, 1982.
- Evans, Robin, The Projective Cast, Architecture and Its Three Geometries,Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1995.
- Forgacs, Eva, The Bauhaus idea and Bauhaus politics, Budapest: Central European University Press, 1995.
- Gropius, Walter. The new architecture and the Bauhaus, London: Faber, 1965.
- Jameson, Frederic, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, London: Verso, 2002.
- Hays, Michael. Modernism and the posthumanist subject: the architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer, Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press , 1995.
- Heynen, Hilde, Architecture and Modernity: a critique, Cambridge, MA:MIT Press,1999.
- Hilberseimer, Ludwig, Großstadtarchitektur, Stuttgart: Julius Hoffmann, 1927.
- Le Corbusier, Vers une Architecture, Paris: Crès, 1923.
- Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space, Oxford:Blackwell, 1991.
- Mumford, Eric Paul, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960, Cambridge, MA:MIT Press, 2002.
- Pérez-Gómez, Alberto &Louis Pelletier, Architectural Representation andthe Perspective Hinge, Cambridge, MA.:MIT Press, 1997.
- Steadman, Philip, The evolution of designs: biological analogy in architecture and theapplied arts, New York: Routledge, 2008.
- Whyte, Iain Boyd, Bruno Taut and the Architecture of Activism, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2010(1982).