This set of essays brings together studies that challenge interpretations of the development of modernist architecture in Third World countries during the Cold War. The topics look at modernism’s part in the transnational development of building technologies and the construction of national and cultural identity. Architectural modernism is far more than another instance of Western expansionist aspirations; it has been developed in cross-cultural spaces and variously localized into nation-building programs and social welfare projects. The first volume to address countries right across the developing world, this book has a key place in the historiography of modern architecture, dealing with non-Western traditions.

This set of essays challenge interpretations of the development of modernist architecture in Third World countries during the Cold War. The topics look at modernism's part in the transnational development of building technologies and the construction of n.

This anthology collects developing scholarship that outlines a new decentred history of global modernism in architecture using postcolonial and other related theoretical frameworks. By both revisiting the canons of modernism and seeking to decolonize and globalize those canons, the volume explores what a genuinely "global" history of architectural modernism might begin to look like. Its chapters explore the historiography and weaknesses of modernism's normative interpretations and propose alternatives to them. The collection offers essays that interrogate transnationalism in new ways, reconsiders the agency of the subaltern and the roles played by infrastructures, materials, and global institutions in propagating a diversity of modernisms internationally. Issues such as colonial modernism, architectural pedagogy, cultural imperialism, and spirituality are engaged. With essays from both established scholars and up-and-coming researchers, this is an important reference for a new understanding of this crucial and developing topic.

In the decades following World War II, modern architecture spread around the globe alongside increased modernization, urbanization, and postwar reconstruction—and it eventually won widespread acceptance. But as the limitations of conventional conceptions of modernism became apparent, modern architecture has come under increasing criticism. In this collection of essays, experienced and emerging scholars take a fresh look at postwar modern architecture by asking what it meant to be "modern," what role modern architecture played in constructing modern identities, and who sanctioned (or was sanctioned by) modernism in architecture. This volume presents focused case studies of modern architecture in three realms—political, religious, and domestic—that address our very essence as human beings. Several essays explore developments in Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia and document a modernist design culture that crossed political barriers, such as the Iron Curtain, more readily than previously imagined. Other essays investigate various efforts to reconcile the concerns of modernist architects with the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church and other Christian institutions. And a final group of essays looks at postwar homebuilding in the United States and demonstrates how malleable and contested the image of the American home was in the mid-twentieth century. These inquiries show the limits of canonical views of modern architecture and reveal instead how civic institutions, ecclesiastical traditions, individual consumers, and others sought to sanction the forms and ideas of modern architecture in the service of their respective claims or desires to be modern.

In the 1930s, the term International Style came into use to describe a new form of architecture evolved from Bauhaus and its conviction that "form follows function." This book traces the exciting evolution of a style while examining the individual and regional forms it took.

Reorienting the field of American literary modernism, Christopher Schedler defines an intercultural form of representation termed border modernism that challenges the aesthetic hegemony of metropolitan (high) modernism. In this study, Schedler compares the works of European and Anglo-American modernists with the works of Mexican, Native American, and Chicano writers who engaged with modernist theories and practices. In the process he uncovers a unique intercultural aesthetic produced in the borderlands of the United States and Mexico aimed at modernizing the native literary traditions of the Americas. Addressing issues of migration, cultural identity, and ethnography, Border Modernism is a major contribution to current debates over the origins and development of American literary modernism and a new model for transnational and intercultural reconstructions of American literary history.