Vernacular Modernism

Vernacular Modernism challenges the common perception of modern architecture as the example of an internationalism which eradicates local traditions and transforms the globe into a faceless urban sprawl. The essays trace the vernacular in some of modernity's most paradigmatic sites - both real and imagined. They engage in a search for an kliom that mediates between place and space, the vernacular and the abstract in architecture, from its early phase and Hermann Muthesius via LeCorbusier's high modernism, to the contemporary movement of a "critical regionalism."

“This collection of essays imaginatively and with great insight discusses the various vernaculars within modernist architectural practice, thereby altering our understanding of modernism's relationship to the past, its uses of memory, and its embeddedness in historically and geographically specific contexts." ”

"The volume's broad geographic scope and inventive exploration of diverse vernacular expressions will convince readers that modernization and modernism were far more open-ended and heterogeneous than previously acknowledged." - H-Net Reviews "- Andreas Huyssen, Columbia University

Maiken Umbach teaches Modern European History at the University of Manchester (UK), and has accepted an Icrea Research Chair at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. She is the author of Federalism and Enlightenment in Germany, 1740-1806 (2000) and German Federalism: Past, Present, Future (2002). Bernd Huppauf is Professor of German at New York University and Director of NYU's Deutsches Haus. He is the author of War, Violence, and the Modern Condition (1997).

"The volume's broad geographic scope and inventive exploration of diverse vernacular expressions will convince readers that modernization and modernism were far more open-ended and heterogeneous than previously acknowledged."-H-Net Reviews "This collection of essays imaginatively and with great insight discusses the various vernaculars within modernist architectural practice, thereby altering our understanding of modernism's relationship to the past, its uses of memory, and its embeddedness in historically and geographically specific contexts." -Andreas Huyssen, Columbia University

Vernacular Modernism challenges the common perception of modern architecture as the example of an internationalism which eradicates local traditions and transforms the globe into a faceless urban sprawl. The essays trace the vernacular in some of modernity's most paradigmatic sites--both real and imagined. They engage in a search for an idiom that mediates between place and space, the vernacular and the abstract in architecture, from its early phase and Hermann Muthesius via LeCorbusier's high modernism, to the contemporary movement of a "critical regionalism."

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