Modernism and reconstruction: architects, networks and plans

摘要

Historians of architectural modernism are famous for responding to the difficulty of making sense of contemporary events by spinning strident and ideologically infused narratives that, at best, have only partly explained the flow of events and actions. The nature of the underlying meta-narratives, of course, has changed over time. Histories of the origins and spread of architectural modernism initially presented modern architecture as the triumphant and inevitable outcome of a process of evolution dating back to the late nineteenth century or before. That self-assured view, however, had worn thin by the late 1960s, when a powerful weight of criticism served to generate another, and equally partial, meta-narrative. In place of triumphalism came cultural pessimism, with approaches that traced chains of causation linking the deficiencies of recently designed urban environments back to the flawed visions of pioneering modern architects.