London calling: Modern architecture in the diaspora, 1933--1951.
Item
-
Title
-
London calling: Modern architecture in the diaspora, 1933--1951.
-
Identifier
-
AAI3083681
-
identifier
-
3083681
-
Creator
-
Lewittes, Deborah.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: Rosemarie Haag Bletter
-
Date
-
2003
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Architecture | Art History
-
Abstract
-
This dissertation reassesses modern architecture and urban theory in mid-twentieth-century century Britain, revealing a progressive culture that was active long before the emergence of the more well-known postwar English avant-garde. The study acknowledges the importance of the international context of modern architecture, while simultaneously elucidating aspects of a Britain-specific discourse. The "diaspora" refers literally to a large community of emigre architects who had left continental Europe before World War II, some as political refugees, but figuratively as well to England as an outpost of continental modernism to which European ideals were transplanted. The theoretical construct of a diaspora provides a framework in which England's modern architecture is not seen as a copy of continental forms, which is the general view of British architectural modernism in the interwar years, but rather as referring to them, since diasporan peoples by definition retain a connection to their homeland. The diaspora also gives us a model for understanding the ways in which modern architecture in England altered or reflected the work in which it was rooted, while taking on particularly English characteristics.;In Britain's early postwar years, the return to humanism in the New Empiricism and the revival of interest in the picturesque as manifested in Townscape are both seen as sentimental and reactionary, but these views are reductive and neglect to consider alternative tendencies. The founding of the ATO (Architects' and Technicians' Organization) by the emigre architect Berthold Lubetkin and his firm Tecton, for example, amounted to a radical critique of the MARS (Modern Architectural Research) Group, the British branch of CIAM (Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne). Furthermore, Tecton's large-scale housing schemes in London counter the prevailing view that postwar England, with its New Towns and welfare state politics, was promoting an unchallenged reversion to nationalistic garden city ideals.;The years under consideration in this study were urgent years for Britain both domestically and globally---whether it was because of economic crises and the influx of refugees in the 1930s, the war in the 1940s, or the need for postwar reconstruction in the 1950s. The intention is to restore to British modern architecture a sense of the urgency that existed in the culture at large.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy Restricted.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.