Re Humanizing Architecture

After the Second World War, a divided Europe was much affected by a period of reconstruction. This was influenced by the different political systems – in the socialist East and in the capitalist West, the focus was on cohesion in society and its cultural and architectural expression. In parallel to the rapidly progressing industrialization of the building industry, debates on the humanization of the built environment were led on both sides with great intensity. The volume shows how, on the back of existentialism, new monumentality, and socialist realism, quite similar concepts and strategies were developed in order to find answers to questions relating to adequate structures for new forms of community and identity.

The international authors of this three-volume work show Europe's post-war architecture in a new light. In spite of geo-political divisions and national differences, the developments in East and West are seen in context for the first time - a mutual perception, the transfer of knowledge, and cooperation, opened avenues across boundaries. Each volume is dedicated to a leading subject and its unfolding across overlapping periods of time. Vol. 1: Re-humanizing Architecture: New Forms of Community, 1950-1970 ; Vol. 2: Re-scaling the Environment: New Landscapes of Design, 1960-1980 ; Vol. 3: Re-framing Identities: Architecture's Turn to History, 1970-1990.

Rehumanizing Housing is a proceeding of a conference of the same name, which was held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, on 27 February 1987. This conference is a gathering of experts from different fields who discussed the subject of housing. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 discusses topics such as concepts, principles, and terminologies, related to housing; prescription in housing design; and problems in housing, while Part 2 deals with housing design, space and enclosure, and management. Part 3 covers the history of housing; its possible direction in the future; and the restructuring of the housing market. The text is recommended for suburban planners, architects, and those involved in real estate and the housing business, especially those who would like to know more about the trends in the subject.

From 1970–1990, architecture experienced a revision as part of the post-modern movement. The critical attitude to the functionalistic Moderne style and the influence of semiotics and philosophical trends, such as phenomenology, on architectural theory led to an increased interest in its history, expression, perception, and context. In addition, architectural heritage and the care of architectural monuments gained importance. This development also increasingly challenged the ideologically based division between East and West. Instead of emphasizing the differences, the search was for a joint cultural heritage. The contributions in this volume question terms such as "Moderne" and "post-modern", and show how architecture could again represent local, regional, and national identity.

From 1960–1980, both eastern and western Europe experienced a construction boom of new dimensions. Cybernetics, the science of planning, and sociology, as well as the new possibilities offered by technology and production, paved the way to large-scale processes and systems in architecture and urban design, which favored technocratic and utopian concepts. Increasingly, architects and planners saw themselves as designers of comprehensive infrastructure and mega-structures in a technology-focused world. The authors assesses these developments on the back of a knowledge transfer between East and West. It confirms a change in attitude that can still be felt today – recession, social changes, and environmental problems led to criticism of the then contemporary concepts of modernity.

Architectural Drawings as Investigating Devices explores how the changing modes of representation in architecture and urbanism relate to the transformation of how the addressees of architecture and urbanism are conceived. The book diagnoses the dominant epistemological debates in architecture and urbanism during the 20th and 21st centuries. It traces their transformations, paying special attention to Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s preference for perspective representation, to the diagrams of Team 10 architects, to the critiques of functionalism, and the upgrade of the artefactual value of architectural drawings in Aldo Rossi, John Hejduk, Peter Eisenman, and Oswald Mathias Ungers, and, finally, to the reinvention of architectural programme through the event in Bernard Tschumi and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Particular emphasis is placed on the spirit of truth and clarity in modernist architecture, the relationship between the individual and the community in post-war era architecture, the decodification of design process as syntactic analogy and the paradigm of autonomy in the 1970s and 1980s architecture, the concern about the dynamic character of urban conditions and the potentialities hidden in architectural programme in the post-autonomy era. This book is based on extensive archival research in Canada, the USA and Europe, and will be of interest to architects, artists, researchers and students in architecture, architectural history, theory, cultural theory, philosophy and aesthetics.

How were the concepts of the observer and user in architecture and urban planning transformed throughout the 20th and 21st centuries? Marianna Charitonidou explores how the mutations of the means of representation in architecture and urban planning relate to the significance of city's inhabitants. She investigates Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's fascination with perspective, Team Ten's interest in the humanisation of architecture and urbanism, Constantinos Doxiadis and Adriano Olivetti's role in reshaping the relationship between politics and urban planning during the postwar years, Giancarlo De Carlo's architecture of participation, Aldo Rossi's design methods, Denise Scott Brown's active socioplactics and Bernard Tschumi's conception praxis.

The Socialist Life of Modern Architecture is the first systematic architectural history of Romania under socialism written in English. It examines the mechanisms through which modern architecture was invested with political meaning and, in reverse, how specific architectural solutions came to define the socialist experience. Each of the book’s three parts traces the historical development of one key aspect of Romania’s architectural culture between the years 1949–1964: the planning and construction of housing districts in Bucharest; the role of typification of design and standardization of construction in a project of cultural transformation; the production and management of a folk architectural tradition. Going beyond buildings and architects to consider the use of photography, painting, and novels, as well as narrations of history and the formation of an ethnographic architectural heritage, the author explores how buildings came to participate in the cultural imagination of socialism—and became, in fact, a privileged medium of socialism. Part of the growing interest in the significance of Soviet Bloc architecture, this is an important contribution to the fields of architectural history, cultural history, and visual culture.