Research Catalog

Title

The history of postmodern architecture / Heinrich Klotz ; translated by Radka Donnell.

Author

Klotz, Heinrich

Publication

Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c1988.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

461 p. : ill. (some col.); 31 cm.

Summary

"This standard work on the postmodern architecture of the past 25 years documents a rich and controversial period. It provides a fascinating, clear, and provocative definition of the phenomena of postmodernism, particularly in relation to the major ideas of modernism. The more than 500 illustrations, including 96 in color, are in themselves a substantial record of the aesthetic preoccupations of postmodernist architects, their patrons, and their detractors. Heinrich Kotz is one of Europe's leading architecture critics. In this panoramic work he challenges popular notions of postmodernism as synonymous with the stylistic license of eclecticism. He seeks to clarify the postmodern in other than stylistic, historic, or regional terms, and he identifies a long succession of canonical "modern" buildings that prepared the way for what would become known as postmodern long before the word existed. His criteria for what defines the postmodern will be challenged, debated, and quoted by historians and architects alike. Klotz focuses both on architects' individual projects and on their bodies of work, combining structural analysis with an assessment of programmatic and philosophical content. "Not only function, but also fiction!" is the guiding concept of the book. His approach leads quite naturally to a gallery of celebrities from the modern and the postmodern period - Mies, Kahn, Venturi, Moore, Ungers, Rossi, Stirling, Hollein, Gehry, Graves, Meier, Hejduk, Eisenman, Botta, Krier, and Stern among them. Also considered are a host of lesser-known contemporary practitioners, including Rem Koolhaas, Thomas Gordon Smith, and Maurice Culot. -- Book Jacket.

Uniform Title

Moderne und Postmoderne. English

Alternative Title

Moderne und Postmoderne.

Subject

• 1900-1999
• Architecture, Postmodern
• Postmodernism

Note

• Translation of: Moderne und Postmoderne.
• Includes index.

Bibliography (note)

• Bibliography: p. 448-449.

Contents

[Pt. 1]: Modernism. Classical Modernism ; Advance notice : "the bare necessities" ; The International Style ; After the war : kidney-shaped tables and candy colors ; The Laboratory Style ; Organic functionalism ; Mies's 1923 design for an office building ; Doctrinaire functionalism ; The Open Ground plan ; Row houses ; The interesting ; The revision of Modernism -- [Pt. 2]: Subterfuges and reorientations. Eclecticism ; Historicism and nostalgia ; Brutalism ; Tank and container construction ; Contextual architecture -- [Pt. 3]: Preconditions for Postmodern Architecture. Circa 1960 ; Louis I. Kahn -- [Pt. 4]: Postmodern Architecture. Architecture as fiction ; Breakthrough to Postmodernism : Robert Venturi ; Charles Moore : "Places" ; American Postmodernism ; Rationalism ; Oswald Mathias Ungers ; Aldo Rossi ; Italian Rationalism ; Rationalism in Germany and elsewhere in Europe ; The New York Five ; James Stirling ; Hans Hollein and the Viennese Architecture of the present ; Architecture and technology ; Against perfection ; Architecture on paper.

ISBN

0262111233

LCCN

^^^87003864^

OCLC

• 15487437
• SCSB-10247409

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library