The Experience Of Modernism

Making extensive use of information gained from in-depth interviews with architects active in the period between 1928-1953, the author provides a sympathetic understanding of the Modern Movement's architectural role in reshaping the fabric and structure of British metropolitan cities in the post-war period and traces the links between the experience of British modernists and the wider international modern movement.

Making extensive use of information gained from in-depth interviews with architects active in the period between 1928-1953, the author provides a sympathetic understanding of the Modern Movement's architectural role in reshaping the fabric and structure of British metropolitan cities in the post-war period and traces the links between the experience of British modernists and the wider international modern movement.

The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.

In this sequel to his widely-acclaimed book The Experience of Modernism (1997), John Gold continues his detailed enquiry into the Modern Movement's involvement in urban planning and city design. Making extensive use of information gained from hours of in-depth interviews with architects of the time, this new book examines the complex relationship between vision and subsequent practice in the saga of postwar urban reconstruction. The Practice of Modernism: traces the personal, institutional and professional backgrounds of the architects involved in schemes for reconstruction and replanning deals directly with the progress of urban transformation, focusing on the contribution that modern architects and architectural principles made to town centre renewal and social housing highlights how the exuberance of the 1960s gave way to the profound reappraisal that emerged by the early 1970s. Written by an expert, this is a key book on the planning aspects of the modernist movement for architectural historians, urban geographers, planners and all concerned with understanding the recent history of the contemporary city.

Using in-depth interviews with architects active between 1928-1953, Gold provides a sympathetic understanding of the Modern Movement's architectural role in reshaping British metropolitan cities in the post-war period.

This is a brilliant, provocative long essay on the rise and fall and survival of modernism, by the English-languages' greatest living cultural historian.

Authoritative and readable, this excellent text, illustrated by a unique pictorial record of period architecture, surveys and examines how and why the architecture of pleasure related to the stylistic and ideological concerns of modernism in 1930s Britain. Responding to the current interest in modernism and packed with a substantial archive of high quality photographs and other documentation, it relates the professional, entrepreneurial and institutional infrastructures affecting the pleasure industry’s architectural development and appearance in 1930s. A broad range of building through which the general public first experienced Modernism are covered, including: commercial – holiday camps, cinemas and greyhound racing stadia municipal and governmental projects – zoos, seaside pavilions, concert halls, and imperial and international exhibitions. Arguing that the responses to modernism through the architecture of pleasure were conditioned by wider debates about the role of design in relation to high and mass culture, this book is an ideal resource for all those interested in architectural history and design in Britain between the wars.

The term "modernism" is central to any discussion of twentieth-century literature and critical theory. Astradur Eysteinsson here maintains that the concept of modernism does not emerge directly from the literature it subsumes, but is in fact a product of critical practices relating to nontraditional literature. Intervening in these practices, and correlating them with modernist works and with modern literary theory, Eysteinsson undertakes a comprehensive reexamination of the idea of modernism. Eysteinsson critically explores various manifestations of modernism in a rich array of American, British, and European literature, criticism, and theory. He first examines many modernist paradigms, detecting in them a conflict between modernism's culturally subversive potential and its relatively conservative status as a formalist project. He then considers these paradigms as interpretations-and fabrications-of literary history. Seen in this light, modernism both signals a historical change on the literary scene and implies the context of that change. Laden with the implications of tradition and modernity, modernism fills its major function: that of highlighting and defining the complex relations between history and postrealist literature. Eysteinsson focuses on the ways in which the concept of modernism directs our understanding of literature and literary history and influences our judgment of experimental and postrealist works in literature and art. He discusses in detail the relation of modernism to the key concepts postmodernism, the avant-garde, and realism. Enacting a crisis of subject and reference, modernism is not so much a form of discourse, he asserts, as its interruption-a possible "other" modernity that reveals critical aspects of our social and linguistic experience in Western culture. Comparatists, literary theorists, cultural historians, and others interested in twentieth-century literature and art will profit from this provocative book.