"A Genealogy of Modern Architecture" is a reference work on modern architecture by Kenneth Frampton, one of today's leading architectural theorists. Conceived as a genealogy of twentieth century architecture from 1924 to 2000, it compiles some sixteen comparative analyses of canonical modern buildings ranging from exhibition pavilions and private houses to office buildings and various kinds of public institutions. The buildings are compared in terms of their hierarchical spatial order, circulation structure and referential details. The analyses are organized so as to show what is similar and different between two paired types, thus revealing how modern tradition has been diversely inflected. Richly illustrated, "A Genealogy of Modern Architecture" is a new standard work in architectural education.

This title was first published in 2002. This really is a text that will fill a long-felt want. A key figure in that history is Amédée Ozenfant, painter, critic and friend of Le Corbusier, who in the first half of this century founded a school in London where he conducted experiments and wrote about color in architecture. Those experiments have been reconstructed for the book, which also includes reprints of his most important articles on the subject. This book provides a fascinating survey of this most contemporary topic that will inspire and inform designers and architects. Color has often been regarded as the final dressing of a building, subject to the vagaries of fashion and left to the client to select. There have been a number of studies of polychromy in the architecture of the more distant past, particularly in relation to modern conservation practices, but there is little or nothing on the architectural color of recent times, and especially within Modernism.

A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture traces the origins of tropical architecture to nineteenth century British colonial architectural knowledge and practices. It uncovers how systematic knowledge and practices on building and environmental technologies in the tropics were linked to military technologies, medical theories and sanitary practices, and were manifested in colonial building types such as military barracks, hospitals and housing. It also explores the various ways these colonial knowledge and practices shaped post-war techno scientific research and education in climatic design and modern tropical architecture. Drawing on the interdisciplinary scholarships on postcolonial studies, science studies, and environmental history, Jiat-Hwee Chang argues that tropical architecture was inextricably entangled with the socio-cultural constructions of tropical nature, and the politics of colonial governance and postcolonial development in the British colonial and post-colonial networks. By bringing to light new historical materials through formidable research and tracing the history of tropical architecture beyond what is widely considered today as its "founding moment" in the mid-twentieth century, this important and original book revises our understanding of colonial built environment. It also provides a new historical framework that significantly bears upon contemporary concerns with climatic design and sustainable architecture. This book is an essential resource for understanding tropical architecture and its various contemporary manifestations. Its in-depth discussion and path breaking insights will be invaluable to specialists, academics, students and practitioners.

This acclaimed survey of modern architecture and its origins has become a classic since it first appeared in 1980. For this fourth edition Kenneth Frampton has added a major new chapter that explores the effects of globalization on architecture in recent years, the rise annd rise of the celebrity architect, and the way in which practices worldwide have addressed such issues as sustainability and habitat. The bibliography has also been updated and expanded, making this volume more complete and indispensable than ever.

This highly acclaimed survey of modern architecture and its origins has become a classic since it first appeared in 1980, and has helped to shape architectural practice and discourse worldwide. For this extensively revised and updated fifth edition, Kenneth Frampton has added a new section that explores in detail the modernist tradition in architecture across the globe in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He examines the varied ways in which architects are not only responding to the geographical, climatic, material and cultural contexts of their buildings, but also pursuing distinct lines of approach that emphasize topography, morphology, sustainability, materiality habitat and civic form. It remains an essential book for all students of architecture and architectural history.

This major work provides the first comprehensive history of one of modernism's most defining and controversial architectural legacies: the 20th-century drive to provide 'homes for the people'. Vast programmes of mass housing – high-rise, low-rise, state-funded, and built in the modernist style – became a truly global phenomenon, leaving a legacy which has suffered waves of disillusionment in the West but which is now seeing a dramatic, 21st-century renaissance in the booming, crowded cities of East Asia. Providing a global approach to the history of Modernist mass-housing production, this authoritative study combines architectural history with the broader social, political, cultural aspects of mass housing – particularly the 'mass' politics of power and state-building throughout the 20th century. Exploring the relationship between built form, ideology, and political intervention, it shows how mass housing not only reflected the transnational ideals of the Modernist project, but also became a central legitimizing pillar of nation-states worldwide. In a compelling narrative which likens the spread of mass housing to a 'Hundred Years War' of successive campaigns and retreats, it traces the history around the globe from Europe via the USA, Soviet Union and a network of international outposts, to its ultimate, optimistic resurgence in China and the East – where it asks: Are we facing a new dawn for mass housing, or another 'great housing failure' in the making?

provides a fascinating, clear, and provocative definition of the phenomena of postmodernism, particularly in relation to the major ideas of modernism

How climate influenced the design strategies of modernist architects Modern Architecture and Climate explores how leading architects of the twentieth century incorporated climate-mediating strategies into their designs, and shows how regional approaches to climate adaptability were essential to the development of modern architecture. Focusing on the period surrounding World War II—before fossil-fuel powered air-conditioning became widely available—Daniel Barber brings to light a vibrant and dynamic architectural discussion involving design, materials, and shading systems as means of interior climate control. He looks at projects by well-known architects such as Richard Neutra, Le Corbusier, Lúcio Costa, Mies van der Rohe, and Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and the work of climate-focused architects such as MMM Roberto, Olgyay and Olgyay, and Cliff May. Drawing on the editorial projects of James Marston Fitch, Elizabeth Gordon, and others, he demonstrates how images and diagrams produced by architects helped conceptualize climate knowledge, alongside the work of meteorologists, physicists, engineers, and social scientists. Barber describes how this novel type of environmental media catalyzed new ways of thinking about climate and architectural design. Extensively illustrated with archival material, Modern Architecture and Climate provides global perspectives on modern architecture and its evolving relationship with a changing climate, showcasing designs from Latin America, Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and Africa. This timely and important book reconciles the cultural dynamism of architecture with the material realities of ever-increasing carbon emissions from the mechanical cooling systems of buildings, and offers a historical foundation for today’s zero-carbon design.

“Utopia” is a word not often associated with the city of Bangkok, which is better known for its disorderly sprawl, overburdened roads, and stifling levels of pollution. Yet as early as 1782, when the city was officially founded on the banks of the Chao Phraya river as the home of the Chakri dynasty, its orientation was based on material and rhetorical considerations that alluded to ideal times and spaces. The construction of palaces, monastic complexes, walls, forts, and canals created a defensive network while symbolically locating the terrestrial realm of the king within the Theravada Buddhist cosmos. Into the twentieth century, pictorial, narrative, and built representations of utopia were critical to Bangkok’s transformation into a national capital and commercial entrepôt. But as older representations of the universe encountered modern architecture, building technologies, and urban planning, new images of an ideal society attempted to reconcile urban-based understandings of Buddhist liberation and felicitous states like nirvana with worldly models of political community like the nation-state. Bangkok Utopia outlines an alternative genealogy of both utopia and modernism in a part of the world that has often been overlooked by researchers of both. It examines representations of utopia that developed in the city—as expressed in built forms as well as architectural drawings, building manuals, novels, poetry, and ecclesiastical murals—from its first general strike of migrant laborers in 1910 to the overthrow of the military dictatorship in 1973. Using Thai- and Chinese-language archival sources, the book demonstrates how the new spaces of the city became arenas for modern subject formation, utopian desires, political hegemony, and social unrest, arguing that the modern city was a space of antinomy—one able not only to sustain heterogeneous temporalities, but also to support conflicting world views within the urban landscape. By underscoring the paradoxical character of utopias and their formal narrative expressions of both hope and hegemony, Bangkok Utopia provides an innovative way to conceptualize the uneven economic development and fractured political conditions of contemporary global cities.

Architecture as Civil Commitment analyses the many ways in which Lucio Costa shaped the discourse of Brazilian modern architecture, tracing the roots, developments, and counter-marches of a singular form of engagement that programmatically chose to act by cultural means rather than by political ones. Split into five chapters, the book addresses specific case-studies of Costa’s professional activity, pointing towards his multiple roles in the Brazilian federal government and focusing on passages of his work that are much less known outside of Brazil, such as his role inside Estado Novo bureaucracy, his leadership at SPHAN, and his participation in UNESCO’s headquarters project, all the way to the design of Brasilia. Digging deep into the original documents, the book crafts a powerful historical reconstruction that gives the international readership a detailed picture of one of the most fascinating architects of the 20th century, in all his contradictory geniality. It is an ideal read for those interested in Brazilian modernism, students and scholars of architectural and urban planning history, socio-cultural and political history, and visual arts.