Material Modernity explores creative innovation in German art, design, and architecture during the Weimar Republic, charting both the rise of new media and the re-fashioning of old media. Weimar became famous for the explosion of creative ingenuity across the arts in Germany, due to experiments with new techniques (including the move towards abstraction in painting and sculpture) and inventive work in such new media as paper and plastic, which utilized both new and old methods of art production. Individual chapters in this book consider inventions such as the camera and materials like celluloid, examine the role of new materials including concrete composites in opening up fresh avenues in the plastic arts, and relate advances in the understanding of color perception and psychology to an increased interest in visual perception and the latent potential of color as both architectural ornament and carrier of emotional force in space. While art historians usually argue that experimentation in the Weimar Republic was the result of an intentional rejection of traditional modes of expression in the conscious attempt to invent a modern art and architecture unshackled from historic media and methods, this volume shows that the drivers for innovation were often far more complex and nuanced. It first of all describes how the material shortages precipitated by the First World War, along with the devastation to industrial infrastructure and disruption of historic trade routes, affected art, as did a spirit of experimentation that permeated interwar German culture. It then analyzes new challenges in the 1920s to artistic conventions in traditional art modes like painting, sculpture, drawing, architecture, textiles, and print-making and simultaneously probes the likely causes of innovative new methods of artistic production that appeared, such as photomontage, assemblage, mechanical art, and multi-media art. In doing so, Material Modernity fills a significant gap in Weimar scholarship and art history literature.

A study of water at the intersection of landscape and infrastructure in Paris, Berlin, Lagos, Mumbai, Los Angeles, and London. Water lies at the intersection of landscape and infrastructure, crossing between visible and invisible domains of urban space, in the tanks and buckets of the global South and the vast subterranean technological networks of the global North. In this book, Matthew Gandy considers the cultural and material significance of water through the experiences of six cities: Paris, Berlin, Lagos, Mumbai, Los Angeles, and London. Tracing the evolving relationships among modernity, nature, and the urban imagination, from different vantage points and through different periods, Gandy uses water as a lens through which to observe both the ambiguities and the limits of nature as conventionally understood. Gandy begins with the Parisian sewers of the nineteenth century, captured in the photographs of Nadar, and the reconstruction of subterranean Paris. He moves on to Weimar-era Berlin and its protection of public access to lakes for swimming, the culmination of efforts to reconnect the city with nature. He considers the threat of malaria in Lagos, where changing geopolitical circumstances led to large-scale swamp drainage in the 1940s. He shows how the dysfunctional water infrastructure of Mumbai offers a vivid expression of persistent social inequality in a postcolonial city. He explores the incongruous concrete landscapes of the Los Angeles River. Finally, Gandy uses the fictional scenario of a partially submerged London as the starting point for an investigation of the actual hydrological threats facing that city.

This examination of the social history of modernization investigates the centuries that followed the year 1000, when a new kind of society emerged in Europe. The text highlights both the 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' changes that characterized the social experience of early modernization.

Winner of the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Book Award in 2012, Chandra Mukerji offers with this remarkable new book an explanation of the birth and subsequent proliferation of the many strands in the braid of modernity. The journey she takes us on is dedicated to teasing those strands apart, using forms of cultural analysis from the social sciences to approach history with fresh eyes. Faced with the problem of trying to understand what is hardest to see: the familiar, she gains analytic distance and clarity by juxtaposing cultural analysis with history, asking how modernity began and how people conjured into existence the world we now recognize as modern. Part I describes the genesis of key modern social forms: the modern self, communities of strangers, the modern state, and the industrial world economy. Part II focuses on modern social types: races, genders, and childhood. Part III focuses on some of the cultural artifacts and activities of the contemporary world that people have invented and used to cope with the burdens of self-making and to react against the broken promises of modern discourse and the silent injuries of material modernism. Beautifully illustrated with over 100 color photographs in its 10 chapters, MODERNITY REIMAGINED is not just an explanation, an analysis of how modern life came to be, it is also a model for how to do cultural thinking about today’s world.

Twenty years after a return from fundamentalism to economic reality, China has become the world's tenth largest economy and an increasingly important global power. Despite the rise of fundamentalism and post-modernism, the pursuit of modernity was an ongoing historical movement in late twentieth century China. He Ping focuses on China's quest for and experience of modernity. Implicitly comparative, the author discusses broad aspects of both Chinese and western civilizations, including their scientific traditions and socio-economic structures, with reference to modernization. He seeks to enhance our understanding of the cultural changes behind China's phenomenal rise and provides a fresh case study for the global cultural discourse.

This book offers a provocative interpretation of cultural discourse in Spanish America. Alonso argues that Spanish American cultural production constituted itself through commitment to what he calls the "narrative of futurity," that is, the uncompromising adoption of modernity. This commitment fueled a rhetorical crisis that followed the embracing of discourses regarded as "modern" in historical and economic circumstance that are themselves the negation of modernity. Through fresh readings of texts by Sarmiento, Mansilla, Quiroga, Vargos Llosa, Garcia Marquez, and others, Alonso tracks this textual dynamic in works from the nineteenth century to the present.

A provocative examination of the connections between contemporary expression in architecture and traditional materials and forms. Architect, architectural historian, and preservationist Françoise Bollack presents eighteen projects that use traditional materials to build contemporary forms or use modern materials to build traditional forms, blurring the boundary between tradition and modernity in architecture. Bollack rejects the modernist taboo against imitation and precedent, tracing the history of adaptive and imitative design from the Renaissance to the Greek and Gothic revivals and to the nineteenth-century modular cast-iron facades that Philip Johnson considered "the basis for modern design." The book examines projects in the US, Europe, and Japan, encompassing a broad range of building types: residential, hospitality, commercial and retail, and cultural spaces. All share an intriguing, even radical, approach to reinterpreting traditional forms and materials. Humble thatch moves beyond the farmhouse roof to clad the walls of a Danish environmental center; a photographic image of a Parisian facade becomes a scrim on the facade of a new building; the ghost of an ancient Italian basilica is outlined in wire mesh. Among the featured architects are Kengo Kuma, architect of the Tokyo 2021 Olympic stadium; MVRDV, a highly regarded Dutch firm; Lacaton & Vassal and Chartier/Corbasson in France; Skene Catling de la Peña in the UK; Morris Adjmi in the USA; Max Dudler in Germany; Dortre Mandrup in Denmark; and Herzog & de Meuron in Switzerland.

Bornstein looks at modernism in its original sites of production.

This book summarizes archaeological approaches to the contemporary past, and suggests a new agenda for the archaeology of late modern societies. The principal focus is the archaeology of developed, de-industrialized societies during the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. This period encompasses the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the 'internet age', a period which sits firmly within what we would recognize to be a period of 'lived and living memory'. Rodney Harrison and John Schofield explore how archaeology can inform the study of this time period and the study of our own society through detailed case studies and an in-depth summary of the existing literature. Their book draws together cross-disciplinary perspectives on contemporary material culture studies, and develops a new agenda for the study of the materiality of late modern societies.

This book explores how modernity, the urban, and the sacred overlap in fundamental ways in contemporary Spain. Urban spaces have traditionally been seen as the original sites of modernity, history, progress, and a Weberian systematic disenchantment of the world, while the sacred has been linked to the natural, the rural, mythical past origins, and exemption from historical change. This collection problematizes such clear-cut distinctions as overlaps between the modern urban and the sacred in Spanish culture are explored throughout the volume. Placed in the periphery of Europe, Spain has had a complex relationship with the concept of modernity and commonly understood processes of modernization and secularization, thus offering a unique case-study of the interaction between the modern and the sacred in the city.