The Architecture Of Phantasmagoria

Download The Architecture Of Phantasmagoria full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online The Architecture Of Phantasmagoria ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!

The Architecture of Phantasmagoria

Author : Libero Andreotti
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1317478738
Total Pages : 223 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (174 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis The Architecture of Phantasmagoria by : Libero Andreotti

Download or read book The Architecture of Phantasmagoria written by Libero Andreotti and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-11-10 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a time of mass-mediated modernity, the city becomes, almost by definition, a constitutively ‘mediated’ city. Today, more than ever before, the omnipresence of media in every sphere of culture is creating a new urban ontology, saturating, fracturing, and exacerbating the manifold experience of city life. The authors describe this condition as one of 'hyper-mediation' – a qualitatively new phase in the city’s historical evolution. The concept of phantasmagoria has pride of place in their study; using it as an all-embracing explanatory framework, they explore its meanings as a critical category to understand the culture, and the architecture, of the contemporary city. Andreotti and Lahiji argue that any account of architecture that does not include understanding the role and function of media and its impact on the city in the present ‘tele-technological-capitalist’ society is fundamentally flawed and incomplete. Their approach moves from Walter Benjamin, through the concepts of phantasmagoria and of media – as theorized also by Theodor Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, and a new generation of contemporary critics – towards a new socio-critical and aesthetic analysis of the mediated space of the contemporary city.

Analogical City

Author : Cameron McEwan
Publisher : punctum books
ISBN 13 : 1685711227
Total Pages : 279 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (857 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Analogical City by : Cameron McEwan

Download or read book Analogical City written by Cameron McEwan and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2024-01-18 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Analogical City, Cameron McEwan argues for architecture’s status as a critical project. McEwan revisits architect Aldo Rossi as a paradigmatic figure of the critical rational tradition, studying a neglected aspect of his thought — the analogical city — to excavate its potential. McEwan develops a grammar of the analogical city under the headings of Imagination, Transformation, City, Multitude, and Project. McEwan argues that the analogical city is critical, collective, and emancipatory. Analogical thought and understanding cities as analogical might open the conditions of possibility for rethinking the critical project in architecture. At a time when the humanities and the sciences are threatened by irrational thought, from climate denial to post-truth narratives, and when architecture has seemingly disavowed its critical capacity and political possibility through its commodification as an instrument of the neoliberal city, McEwan offers critical strategies, conceptual tools, figures of thought, and knowledge practices to articulate modes of thinking and acting differently within architectural criticism and practice. Today, knowledge is a common terrain of struggle and thought requires constant reinvention. The task of architecture, and critique more broadly, must be to interpret the world in order to change it. Consequently Analogical City proposes modes for imagining the city, the subject, and the world otherwise — towards a more egalitarian and critical architecture of the city. Ultimately, the analogical city is not a fully developed theory, nor is it only an intuitive, poetic, or purely formal practice, as some critics propose. McEwan argues that the analogical city is poetic and political: it always refers beyond itself towards a collective and critical project of the city, and yet it invites a series of formal, spatial, and graphic operations comprising erasure and negativity followed by substitution and remontage.

Kōjin Karatani’s Philosophy of Architecture

Author : Nadir Lahiji
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1003846955
Total Pages : 206 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (38 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Kōjin Karatani’s Philosophy of Architecture by : Nadir Lahiji

Download or read book Kōjin Karatani’s Philosophy of Architecture written by Nadir Lahiji and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-02-06 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Nadir Lahiji introduces Kōjin Karatani’s theoretical-philosophical project and demonstrates its affinity with Kant’s critical philosophy founded on ‘architectonic reason’. From the ancient Greeks we have inherited a definition of the word ‘philosophy’ as Sophia—wisdom. But in his book Architecture as Metaphor Kōjin Karatani introduces a different definition of philosophy. Here, Karatani critically defines philosophy not in association with Sophia but in relation to foundation as the Will to Architecture. In this novel definition resides the notion that in Western thought a crisis persistently reveals itself with every attempt to build a system of knowledge on solid ground. This book reveals the implications of this extraordinary exposition. This is the first book to uncover Kōjin Karatani’s highly significant ideas on architecture for both philosophical and architectural audiences.

Architecture in the Age of Pornography

Author : Nadir Lahiji
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000440915
Total Pages : 137 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (4 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Architecture in the Age of Pornography by : Nadir Lahiji

Download or read book Architecture in the Age of Pornography written by Nadir Lahiji and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Architecture, and its pedagogy in the academy, is dominated by the technology of image production that veils the ‘naked power’ behind its operation. It conforms to the principles of cultural logic of the society of the spectacle, consistent with neoliberal capitalism. The problem with this dominant pedagogy is that it violates the fundamental ethical imperative, putting architecture in direct contradiction with the ‘common good’. In addition, it has let architecture enter the brothel of pornographic capitalism which turns every object into an object of obscene gratification of the senses. In this book, Nadir Lahiji adopts Alain Badiou’s thesis from The Pornographic Age to demonstrate that contemporary architecture is in absolute complicity with the pornographic present. The traits that Badiou identifies in this age are manifestly visible in architectural surfaces which are subordinated to the same ‘regime of images’. Similarly to Badiou’s political indictments of the society which has given rise to the pornographic present, the book condemns the architecture that has lent its service to the same society with a license to consummate its transgression to better cater to the imperative of the ‘regime of images’. Transposing the conceptual categories in Badiou’s analysis to the critique of architecture’s pornographic turn in contemporary society, the book constructs a conceptual framework by which to demonstrate the specific manifestations of pornography in building. The book is aimed at architecture students at higher graduate and post-graduate levels.

An Architecture Manifesto

Author : Nadir Lahiji
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0429885067
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (298 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis An Architecture Manifesto by : Nadir Lahiji

Download or read book An Architecture Manifesto written by Nadir Lahiji and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-02-06 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this manifesto, the author takes a leap of faith. It is a faith in Lost Causes. He asserts that today, architectonic reason has fallen into ruins. As soon as architecture leaves the limits set to it by architectonic reason, no other path is open to it but the path to aestheticism. This is the wrong path contemporary architecture has taken. In its reduction to a pure aesthetic object, architecture negatively affects the human sensorium. Capitalist consumer society creates desires by generating ‘surplus-enjoyment’ for capitalist profit and contemporary architecture has become an instrument in generating this ‘surplus-enjoyment’, with fatal consequences. This manifesto is thus both a critique and a work of theory. It is a siren, alarm, klaxon to the current status quo within architectural discourse and a timely response to the conditions of architecture today.

Architecture in the Age of Mediatizing Technologies

Author : Sang Lee
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1040135366
Total Pages : 317 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (41 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Architecture in the Age of Mediatizing Technologies by : Sang Lee

Download or read book Architecture in the Age of Mediatizing Technologies written by Sang Lee and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-31 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a novel perspective on contemporary architecture, exploring its position in mediatization, attained through technological apparatuses. It introduces the novel concepts of apparatus-centricity and mediatization of architecture, which have significant disciplinary and cultural ramifications. Highlighting key technological and theoretical developments, the book’s narrative traces the transformation of architecture from the modernist era to the present, digital age. En route, it reflects on how architecture becomes a crucial element of shifting dispositives through its confluence with technologies of aestheticization and virtualization, and by emblematizing ecological ideals. It also illuminates the reconfiguring of architectural practice through examining surprising interactions and analogies between architecture and music, whose developments in notation and codification continually change the relationship between composer and performer. The book explores how architecture is reshaped by broader theory and practice in media and ultimately serves as a cognitive agent. It underscores that architecture profoundly influences our phantasmagoric, image-driven affective world through its increasingly apparatus-centric approach to conception, design, production, and mediatization. Architecture in the Age of Mediatizing Technologies brings into focus the behavior of architecture in mediatization for researchers and advanced students in architectural design, theory, and history. As an investigation into the interdisciplinary impact of architecture in a mediatized culture at large, it also provides a valuable resource for cultural and media studies.

Architecture, Philosophy, and the Pedagogy of Cinema

Author : Nadir Lahiji
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000392104
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (3 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Architecture, Philosophy, and the Pedagogy of Cinema by : Nadir Lahiji

Download or read book Architecture, Philosophy, and the Pedagogy of Cinema written by Nadir Lahiji and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-26 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophers on the art of cinema mainly remain silent about architecture. Discussing cinema as ‘mass art’, they tend to forget that architecture, before cinema, was the only existing ‘mass art’. In this work author Nadir Lahiji proposes that the philosophical understanding of the collective human sensorium in the apparatus of perception must once again find its true training ground in architecture. Building art puts the collective mass in the position of an ‘expert critic’ who identifies themselves with the technical apparatus of architecture. Only then can architecture regain its status as ‘mass art’ and, as the book contends, only then can it resume its function as the only ‘artform’ that is designed for the political pedagogy of masses, which originally belonged to it in the period of modernity before the invention of cinema.

On Power in Architecture

Author : Mateja Kurir
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1040110053
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (41 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis On Power in Architecture by : Mateja Kurir

Download or read book On Power in Architecture written by Mateja Kurir and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-09-30 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Architecture has always been a decisive manifestation of power. This volume represents an attempt to question and reflect on the relationship between power and architecture from three philosophical perspectives: materialistic, phenomenological and post-structuralist. This collection opens an interdisciplinary investigation that aims to reflect on architecture and its interconnectedness with power within philosophy and cultural theory at large while presenting these concepts using practical examples from the built environment. Internationally recognised authors – philosophers, architectural theorists and historians – Andrew Benjamin, Andrew Ballantyne, Mladen Dolar, Hilde Heynen, Nadir Lahiji, Jeff Malpas, Dean Komel, Elke Krasny, Robert Pfaller, Gerard Reinmuth, Luka Skansi, Douglas Spencer, Teresa Stoppani and Sven-Olov Wallenstein present their reflections in original unpublished essays and interviews. In the presented works, architecture is combined and transgressed by philosophy in a new discussion that focuses only on power. The contributions in this collection open a variety of architectural questions, one of the central among them being the impact of neoliberal capitalism on architecture. Architecture, with its implications on the complex contemporary political and social reality, is severely changing our space and, more globally, our environment. A reflection on the multilayered relation between architecture and power has never been as topical as it is today. This book will, therefore, be of interest to students, researchers and academics or professionals within the fields of architecture, philosophy, sociology, political sciences and cultural sciences.

Critique of Architecture

Author : Douglas Spencer
Publisher : Birkhäuser
ISBN 13 : 3035621640
Total Pages : 228 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (356 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Critique of Architecture by : Douglas Spencer

Download or read book Critique of Architecture written by Douglas Spencer and published by Birkhäuser. This book was released on 2021-01-18 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critique of Architecture offers a renewed and radical theorization of the relations between capital and architecture. It explicates the theoretical gymnastics through which architecture legitimates its services to neoliberalism, examines the discipline’s production of platforms for happily compliant consumers, and challenges its entrepreneurial self-image. Critique of Architecture also addresses the discourse of autonomy, questioning its capacity to engage effectively with the terms and conditions of capitalism today, analyses the post-political turns of contemporary architecture theory, and reckons with the legacies and limitations of critical theory.

Mark Foster Gage

Author : Mark Foster Gage
Publisher : Rizzoli Publications
ISBN 13 : 0847862097
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (478 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Mark Foster Gage by : Mark Foster Gage

Download or read book Mark Foster Gage written by Mark Foster Gage and published by Rizzoli Publications. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gage, Yale theorist, architect, and pioneer of the digital avant-garde in architecture and design, presents here a phantasmagoria of ideas and built work in his first monograph. Architect to Lady Gaga and Nicola Formichetti, Mark Foster Gage has spent 20 years leading the digital architectural avant-garde, pushing the boundaries of what is possible in architecture and design and exploding expectations. This volume features built and unbuilt work from around the globe, from a penthouse in downtown Manhattan to retail stores in Hong Kong. The work shown goes beyond traditional architecture to the realm of fashion and fine art, and includes Gage’s celebrated Valentine’s Sculpture for Times Square, a 3-D-printed outfit for Lady Gaga, as well as designs for Google Glass, Solar Flowers, and robotic tulips. Mark Foster Gage, whose work Harper’s Bazaar has called “effortlessly chic” and who has been labeled a “boundary breaker,” is a visionary for today. Filled with surprises and creations of wonder, such as a tower for New York’s 57th Street with mouthlike balconies on giant wings or a retail space bedecked with a hundred-faceted mirror, Gage’s work at once challenges expectations of what architecture might be and, as well, frequently fills one with a sense of excitement. Gage’s work is further elucidated in the book by the critical musings of eminent architects and cultural touchstones Peter Eisenman and Robert A.M. Stern.

Revolt and Reform in Architecture's Academy

Author : William Richards
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317307895
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (173 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Revolt and Reform in Architecture's Academy by : William Richards

Download or read book Revolt and Reform in Architecture's Academy written by William Richards and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revolt and Reform in Architecture’s Academy uniquely addresses the complicated relationship between architectural education and urban renewal in the 1960s, which paved the way for what is today known as public interest design. Through an examination of curricular reforms at Columbia University’s and Yale University’s schools of architecture in the 1960s, this book translates the "urban crisis" through the experiences of two influential groups of architecture students, as well as their contributions to design’s lexicon. The book argues that urban renewal and campus expansion half a century ago recast architectural education at two schools whose host cities, New York and New Haven, were critical sites for political, social, and urban upheaval in America. The urban challenges of that time are the same challenges rapidly growing cities face today—access, equity, housing, and services. As architects, architects in training, and architecture students continue to wrestle with questions surrounding how design may serve a broadly defined public interest, this book is a timely assessment of the forces that have shaped the debate.

Architecture or Revolution

Author : Nadir Lahiji
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000045048
Total Pages : 139 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Architecture or Revolution by : Nadir Lahiji

Download or read book Architecture or Revolution written by Nadir Lahiji and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By linking building theory to the emancipatory project of critique advanced by radical thinkers in our time, this work investigates the key conceptual and historical elements that culminate in an emancipatory theory of building entitled: 'Toward a philosophy of shelter’. Taking Marx as its only resource, this work proceeds with the conviction that our era is contemporaneous to Marx’s historical era. This means ‘not judging the validity of Marx from the perspective of the historical situation’, but rather, ‘demonstrating the validity of a Marxian perspective for a singular historical situation’, as ours. This work will therefore translate this perspective into seeing the situation of architecture through the eyes of Marx. All those concerned with the predicament in our current condition in which architecture must play a major social role in upholding the universal value of what Alain Badiou calls 'generic humanity' will take an interest in this work. In particular, architects, critics, scholars, and students inside the field of architecture who would be seeking the application of this universal value to a new theory of building will be a welcoming audience for this work.

Urban Phantasmagorias

Author : Iulia Stătică
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000909824
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (9 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Urban Phantasmagorias by : Iulia Stătică

Download or read book Urban Phantasmagorias written by Iulia Stătică and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-11-30 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Urban Phantasmagorias examines the legacies of socialist housing in the city of Bucharest during the period of communist rule in Romania. The book explores the manner in which the socialist state reconfigured the city through concrete acts of demolition and construction, as well as indirectly through legal frameworks aimed at the regulation of women’s reproductive agency, in an attempt to materialize its idea of modernity. It follows the effects of this state agenda with a focus on the period between 1965 and 1989 through an investigation of the transformations, representations, meanings, and uses of domestic spaces. The book draws on Walter Benjamin’s concept of phantasmagoria, which provides a critical framework through which it articulates the dynamic relationship between ideology, architecture, and everyday practices, and reassesses their impact upon individual subjectivity and agency. The woman emerges as a central subject of the book, upon whom the phantasmagoric effects of the socialist state’s modernizing agenda have an acute impact at the level of lived domesticity and everyday life. Through a focus on the lived experiences of women, the book illuminates the prismatic effect of the state’s infrastructural and legal intentions, including the ways in which these were subverted through women’s lived bodily experiences of the home. The book establishes, both theoretically and through the concrete case of the city of Bucharest, the methodological significance of Benjamin’s notion of phantasmagoria as an epistemological approach to a modern communist cityscape. Urban Phantasmagorias is an important contribution to scholarship in architectural history and theory, urban and gender studies, and post-socialist and Eastern European studies.

Contemporary Urban Design Thinking

Author : Rob Roggema
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3319919504
Total Pages : 236 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (199 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Contemporary Urban Design Thinking by : Rob Roggema

Download or read book Contemporary Urban Design Thinking written by Rob Roggema and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-10-03 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is oriented on cities and their role in society, from the public places created in cities to the visionary and more abstract views on large scale developments. The chapter authors argue, each in their own way, how urban design can produce an answer to these questions. Furthermore, detailed insights are given into how current designers, architects, urbanists and landscape architects deal with the contemporary urban problems of our time: climate change, migration, resiliency, politics, environmental change This book includes chapters from leading thinkers in urban design, city development and landscape urbanism fields. The authors have included the most recent insights in urbanism ensuring that this book provides a state-of-the -art text which is both actual and timely.

Narrating Architecture

Author : James Madge
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134189664
Total Pages : 621 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (341 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Narrating Architecture by : James Madge

Download or read book Narrating Architecture written by James Madge and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-09-27 with total page 621 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology brings together the best and most interesting papers from the first ten years of The Journal of Architecture, published together for the first time in a single volume. Covering a wide range of topics of central importance to architecture today, the papers also address the related topics to which architecture and architectural studies are inextricably linked. The invited authors draw on sociology, philosophy, cultural studies and the sciences to round out the collection and highlight the breadth and vitality of modern architectural studies, offering perspectives from different disciplines as well as different corners of the globe.

Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture

Author : Ulrich Conrads
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 9780262530309
Total Pages : 196 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (33 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture by : Ulrich Conrads

Download or read book Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture written by Ulrich Conrads and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1975-11-15 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume offers eloquent testimony that many of the master builders of this century have held passionate convictions regarding the philosophic and social basis of their art. Nearly every important development in the modern architectural movement began with the proclamation of these convictions in the form of a program or manifesto. The most influential of these are collected here in chronological order from 1903 to 1963. Taken together, they constitute a subjective history of modern architecture; compared with one another, their great diversity of style reveals in many cases the basic differences of attitude and temperament that produced a corresponding divergence in architectural style. In point of view, the book covers the aesthetic spectrum from right to left; from programs that rigidly generate designs down to the smallest detail to revolutionary manifestoes that call for anarchy in building form and town plan. The documents, placed in context by the editor, are also international in their range: among them are the seminal and prophetic statements of Henry van de Velde, Adolf Loos, and Bruno Taut from the early years of the century; Frank Lloyd Wright's 1910 annunciation of Organic Architecture; Gropius's original program for the Bauhaus, founded in Weimar in 1919; "Towards a New Architecture, Guiding Principles" by Le Corbusier; the formulation by Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner of the basic principles of Constructivism; and articles by R. Buckminster Fuller on universal architecture and the architect as world planner. Other pronouncements, some in flamboyant style, including those of Erich Mendelsohn, Hannes Meyer, Theo van Doesburg, Oskar Schlemmer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, El Lissitzky, and Louis I. Kahn. There are also a number of collective or group statements, issued in the name of movements such as CIAM, De Stijl, ABC, the Situationists, and GEAM. Since the dramatic effectiveness of the manifesto form is usually heightened by brevity and conciseness, it has been possible to reproduce most of the documents in their entirety; only a few have been excerpted.

Tracing Modernity

Author : Mari Hvattum
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 113440638X
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (344 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Book Synopsis Tracing Modernity by : Mari Hvattum

Download or read book Tracing Modernity written by Mari Hvattum and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-08-02 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2004. Walter Benjamin famously defined modernity as “the world dominated by its phantasmagorias”. The chapters in this book focus on one such phantasmagoria, namely that of ‘modernity’ itself. From the late seventeenth century until today, the ‘modern’ has served as a key category by which to understand an ever-changing present. Art and architecture have played a key role in this pursuit as the means by which the modern was to manifest itself. The aim of this anthology is to trace the modern project through its multifarious manifestations, in order to understand contemporary culture in a deeper sense than facile discussions of modernism and post-modernism often grant. Drawing on architectural and urban history as well as philosophy and sociology, the chapters outline the complex and conflicting roots of modernity by tracing its manifestations in architecture and the city. The book is divided into three parts, each exploring a distinct aspect of modernity. While part one scrutinizes the much-abused concepts of ‘modernity’ , ‘modernism’ and ‘the modern’ , parts two and three look at the manifestations of the modern in architecture and the city respectively. Focusing particularly on the transition between historicism and modernism, the chapters offer a re-interpretation of early modern architectural and urban culture as it came to expression in people such as Cerda, Semper, Bötticher, Scott, Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers, Benjamin, Warburg, Kracauer, Mackintosh, Behrens, Taut, and Le Corbusier. For all their differences, these were thinkers and practitioners whose undisputed modernity arose from a deep preoccupation with history. A re-reading of their legacy may throw light on the neglected reciprocity between modernity and its historical conditions of becoming.