Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Architectures: Modernism and After surveys the history of the building from the advent of industrialization to the cultural imperatives of the present moment.

Brings together international art and architectural historians to consider a range of topics that have influenced the shape, profile, and aesthetics of the built environment. Presents crucial "moments" in the history of the field when the architecture of the past is made to respond to new and changing cultural circumstances. Provides a view of architectural history as a part of a continuing dialogue between aesthetic criteria and social and cultural imperatives. Part of the New Interventions in Art History Series, which is published in conjunction with the Association of Art Historians.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editor's Preface
• Preface
• Introduction
• Architectures in the Plural
• 1 An Avant-garde Academy
• 2 Aalto and the Tutelary Goddesses
• 3 Becoming-skyscraper: Ayn Rand's Architect
• 4 Steps Towards a Sustainable Architecture
• 5 Gordon Matta-Clark's Building Dissections
• 6 Territoriality and Identity at RAF Menwith Hill
• 7 Domestic Space Transformed, 1850-2000
• 8 English Townscape as Cultural and Symbolic Capital
• Bibliography
• Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This book is one of several that have come out of England in the recent past--published by Routledge, Blackwell, and Thames and Hudson--that seek to flesh out the accomplishments of the modern movement in architecture over the past hundred years. The volume at hand contains eight essays by accomplished scholars on such luminaries as Alvar Aalto, Ayn Rand (author of The Fountainhead, 1943), and Gordon Matta-Clarke, and such movements as English Townscape of the 1950s and the neo-avant garde of the last 30 years. The effect of these essays, and of the larger group of publications exemplified by this book, is to float the architectural history of the last hundred years on a raft of social psychology, aligning it mainly with German critical theory, but also with French poststructuralism. For example, we learn about the poststructuralist cultural geography of Menwith Hill military base in North Yorkshire, England, and the manic-depressive love life of Alvar Aalto, one of the 20th century's greatest architects. ^BSumming Up: Optional. Graduate students and beyond. P. Kaufman Boston Architectural Center

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Andrew Ballantyne is Professor of Architecture at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He is the author of Architecture, Landscape and Liberty: Richard Payne Knight and the Picturesque (1997), What is Architecture? (2002), and Architecture: A Very Short Introduction (2002).