Colquhoun - Modern Architecture

Alan Colquhoun

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Alan Colquhoun 2002

First published 2002 by Oxford University Press

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0192842269

10 9 8 7 6 5 4

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ISBN 13: 978-0-19-284226-8

ISBN 10: 0-19-284226-9

Picture research by Elisabeth Agate
Typesetting and production management by
The Running Head Limited, Cambridge, www.therunninghead.com
Printed in Hong Kong on acid-free paper by C&C Offset Printing Co. Ltd

Many people haveknowingly or unknowinglycontributed to the making of this book. But, for reading and commenting upon various chapters I am particularly indebted to Jean-Louis Cohen, Esther Da Costa Meyer, Hubert Damisch, Hal Foster, Jacques Gubler, Robert Gutman, Michael J. Lewis, Sarah Linford, Steven A. Mansbach, Arno Mayer, Guy Nordensen, Antoine Picon, and Mark Wigley. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Mary McLeod, who read and offered valuable advice on the entire manuscript, and to John Farnham and Can Bilsel for their help, both practical and intellectual, at crucial moments in its preparation. I would also like to thank my editors at Oxford University Press, Simon Mason and Katherine Reeve, for their advice and encouragement. Last but not least, I would like to thank Frances Chen and her staff in the library of the Princeton University School of Architecture, for their unfailing kindness and help.

During the preparation of the book I received a generous scholarship from the Simon Guggenheim Foundation and a Senior Samuel H. Kress Fellowship at the Center for the Study of the Visual Arts, the National Gallery, Washington, DC, both of which I gratefully acknowledge.

The term modern architecture is ambiguous. It can be understood to refer to all buildings of the modern period regardless of their ideological basis, or it can be understood more specifically as an architecture conscious of its own modernity and striving for change. It is in the latter sense that it has generally been defined in histories of contemporary architecture, and the present book follows this tradition. Already in the early nineteenth century, there was wide dissatisfaction with eclecticism among architects, historians, and critics. This well-documented attitude justifies a history of modern architecture concerned primarily with reformist, avant-garde tendencies, rather than one that attempts to deal with the whole of architectural production as if it operated within a non-ideological, neutral field.