In Yugoslavia's Third Way architecture, Brutalism meets the fantastical

Squeezed between the two rival Cold War blocs, Yugoslav architecture consistently adhered to a modernist trajectory. As a founding nation of the Non-Aligned Movement, Yugoslavia became a major exporter of modernist architecture to Africa and the Middle East in a postcolonial world. By merging a variety of local traditions and contemporary international influences in the context of a unique Yugoslav brand of socialism, often described as the Third Way, local architects produced a veritable parallel universe of modern architecture during the 45 years of the country's existence. This remarkable body of work has sparked recurrent international interest, yet a rigorous interpretative study never materialized in the United States until now.

Published in conjunction with a major exhibition on the architectural production of Yugoslavia between 1948 and 1980, this is the first publication to showcase an understudied but important body of modernist architecture. Featuring new scholarship and previously unpublished archival materials, this richly illustrated publication sheds light on key ideological concepts of Yugoslav architecture, urbanism and society by delving into the exceptional projects and key figures of the era, among them Bogdan Bogdanovic, Zoran Bojovic, Drago Galic, Janko Konstantinov, Georgi Konstantinovski, Niko Kralj, Boris Magas, Juraj Neidhardt, Joze Plecnik, Svetlana Kana Radevic, Edvard Ravnikar, Vjenceslav Richter, Milica Steric, Ivan Straus and Zlatko Ugljen.

Now available in its original edition along with critical commentary, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture is the founding text of postmodernism in architecture

First published in 1966, Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, widely considered the foundational text of postmodernism, has become an essential document in architectural theory and criticism.
This new two-volume boxed set presents a facsimile of the original edition paired with a compendium of new scholarship on and around Venturi's seminal treatise.

The ten selected essays, a number of which were presented at a three-day international conference co-organized by MoMA to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Complexity and Contradiction in 2016, address diverse issues, such as the book's relationship to Venturi's own built oeuvre and its significance in the contemporary landscape. Additional short commentaries by contemporary practitioners attest to Complexity's enduring influence on architectural practice. Together, these two volumes expand the horizons of--and introduce a new generation to--Venturi's gentle manifesto.

Montage has been hailed as one of the key structural principles of modernity, yet its importance to the history of modern thought about cities and their architecture has never been adequately explored. In this groundbreaking new work, Martino Stierli charts the history of montage in late 19th-century urban and architectural contexts, its application by the early 20th-century avant-gardes, and its eventual appropriation in the postmodern period. With chapters focusing on photomontage, the film theories of Sergei Eisenstein, Mies van der Rohe's spatial experiments, and Rem Koolhaas's use of literary montage in his seminal manifesto Delirious New York (1978), Stierli demonstrates the centrality of montage in modern explorations of space, and in conceiving and representing the contemporary city. Beautifully illustrated, this interdisciplinary book looks at architecture, photography, film, literature, and visual culture, featuring works by artists and architects including Mies, Koolhaas, Paul Citroen, George Grosz, Hannah H ch, El Lissitzky, and Le Corbusier.

How South Asian architects broke with the colonial past and found ingenious ways to negotiate modernism's universalist claims with the material and labor conditions on the ground

South Asia holds a unique place among the many regions of the world where modern architecture was understood as both a tool for social progress and a global lingua franca in the second half of the 20th century. Following the end of British rule in 1947-48, architects in the newly formed nations of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh (East Pakistan until 1971) and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) proposed a novel understanding of modernity, disrupting the colonial hierarchy of center and periphery by challenging modernism's universalist claims.
Architecture offered multiple ways to break with the colonial past. Through the establishment of institutions that embodied the societal aspirations of the period, and the creation of new cities and spaces for political representation, South Asian architects produced a distinct body of work in dialogue with global developments while advancing the theory and practice of low-cost, climatically and socially responsive design.
Anchored by a newly commissioned portfolio of images from architectural photographer Randhir Singh, this richly illustrated and meticulously researched catalog features essays by the curators and leading scholars in the field on subjects such as the politics of concrete, institution-building, higher education, housing, infrastructure and industry, landscape and design, as well as presentations of 17 transformative projects from around the subcontinent. While several of the architects appearing in these pages have in recent years received monographic exhibitions, The Project of Independence marks the first attempt to consider their work within the ideological frameworks of its creation and the political context of the region as a whole.

If participation has been an ideal in politics since ancient democracy, in art it became central only with the avant-gardes emerging from WWI and the Russian Revolution. Politics and aesthetics are still catching up with each other. In the 21st century, since the revolutionary unrest of the 1960s, participation in art and architecture has lost its utopian glow and become the focus of a fierce debate: does 'participatory' art and architecture shape social reality, or is it shaped by it?

Contemporary critics see in participation only technocratic control, while others embrace it as a viable politics in an era of global capitalism. This innovative book breaks the impasse by looking at how participants themselves exert power, rather than being victimized or liberated from it. From artists hijacking Google Earth to protesters setting up a museum of the revolution in Cairo, art, architecture and daily life are explored in their participatory dimension.

Learning from Las Vegas, published in 1972 by the architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, marks the turn in architectural theory from modern to post-modern. Martino Stierli explores the significance of this controversial publication by situating it in the artistic, architectural, and urbanist discourse of the 1960s and '70s, and by evaluating the book's enduring influence on visual studies and architectural research. Stierli provides an original, in-depth analysis of the postmodern image of the city and the representation of urban form in visual media, graphics, and typography.

Referencing cinematic visualization, the authors of Learning from Las Vegas documented a sprawling postwar American city from a moving car. Stierli examines this methodology against the background of contemporary pop and conceptual art, including the work of artists Ed Ruscha and Stephen Shore. Using both text and image, Stierli assesses the broad intellectual impact of this architectural manifesto and explains why the lessons from Learning from Las Vegas remain relevant today.

When Dessau was bombed in early 1945, the Bauhaus Masters' Houses, the epitome of the 20th-century artists' colony, were reduced to rubble as well.

After the main Masters' Houses were restored to their original state in the 1990s, Walter Gropius's Director's House and L szl Moholy-Nagy's Master's House were still in ruins, and a debate began over their reconstruction. What was the relevance of these structures at the turn of a new century? In 2010, after consultation with the British architect David Chipperfield, the decision was made to reinterpret the House Gropius and House Moholy-Nagy using contemporary means, rather than rebuilding them as 1:1 reconstructions.

The Berlin firm Bruno-Fioretti-Marquez was commissioned to design new Masters' Houses. These new structures use the same formal vocabulary of simple, functional forms and right angles as the original Bauhaus buildings, but update these for the 21st century through selective reduction and abstraction. The project represents a unique, thoughtful engagement with the problems of architectural reconstruction grounded in criticality and creativity rather than blind reverence. The New Masters' Houses in Dessau, 1925-2014 describes the checkered history of the Dessau Masters' Houses and presents the reconstructed buildings for the first time in book form, with photographs by Armin Linke and Heidi Specker.

If participation has been an ideal in politics since ancient democracy, in art it became central only with the avant-gardes emerging from WWI and the Russian Revolution. Politics and aesthetics are still catching up with each other. In the 21st Century, since the revolutionary unrest of the 1960s, participation in art and architecture has lost its utopian glow and become the focus of a fierce debate: does 'participatory' art and architecture shape social reality, or is it shaped by it? Contemporary critics see in participation only technocratic control, while others embrace it as a viable politics in an era of global capitalism. This volume breaks the impasse by looking at how participants themselves exert power, rather than being victimized or liberated from it. From artists hijacking Google Earth to protesters setting up a museum of the revolution in Cairo, art, architecture, and daily life are explored in their participatory dimension.