MAKING A NEW WORLD? RE-FORMING/DESIGNING MODERN COMMUNITIES IN INTER-WAR EUROPE
International colloquium in Belgium, University of Leuven, 09-10/06/2006
* Keywords: architecture – modernity – community – reformist modernism –
inter-war – cultural identities
* 250 word abstracts are due on 31 December 2005. They will be reviewed by
the planning committee of the International Research Community Cultural
Identities, World Views and Architecture at the beginning of Januar.
* address for the proposals: [log in to unmask]
CALL FOR PAPERS
The history of the avant-garde in architecture and urbanism in the interwar
period has been studied extensively. Less well known are the strategies,
discourses and practices that were developed by other, more moderate, groups
in response to the disrupting experience of modernity; in particular those
who sought to deal with the contradictions of modern life by appropriating
parts of modernity and by re-negotiating the meaning of ‘community’ in its
confrontation with ‘society’ (Tönnies) In announcing this call, we aim to
bring together a series of papers which will offer new insights into the
relationship between architecture and modernity in the inter-war decades
and, in so doing, initiate a revision of our understandings of where
innovations in space-making took place at this time.
We are interested in those individuals and organisations that engaged with
modernity not in a straightforward and often dogmatic, way, as did the
avant-garde, but rather with a cautious ‘yes, but …’. Such groups shared
with the avant-garde the desire to develop new forms and spaces but did not
follow its thoroughgoing acceptance of all the requirements and
contradictions of modern life (up to the idea that ‘art would die’). Our
subjects are, then, those who pleaded for a ‘reformist’ approach to
modernity, taking advantage of some of its potentialities (e.g. technology,
efficiency, rationality, new forms of mass media) but accommodating this
within an attitude that was not aimed towards a complete social or political
revolution, but rather a quiet, less disruptive and non-revolutionary
transformation of society.
For further information, please see attachment.
|