American Architects and Modernities, 1945-1980

Overview

While after the second world war the mainstream of American architecture – a “less is more” culture of functionalist glass and steel towers – swept over the world as a visible sign of America’s economic power and political hegemony, a new generation of US architects created provocative alternatives to rationalistic, architectural models and repetitive convention. From the early Philip Johnson to Robert Venturi and Charles Moore, this course follows the highly branched evolution of an American vanguard that deconstructed the paradigms of their teachers by questioning their universal validity. Once again, architecture became a bearer of meaning, thus regaining its close alliance to the visual arts. Today, we may understand this alliance as being crucial to a (re)vitalised urban environment. This, in turn, may underline the substantial impact this period of architecture ha(d)s on current architectural discourse.

Aims

By the end of the module, students should have acquired:

• An understanding of form, structure and meaning of architectural production during the second half of the 20th century
• An ability to communicate and discuss scholarly approaches to works of architecture as interpretative perspectives which complement one another
• The skills of reading architecture as an artistic language whose grammar can be decoded by means of visual perception, systematic analysis and accurate description