Non West Modernist Past

This book provides a comprehensive historical and theoretical overview of modern architecture in regions outside the “West” — Europe and North America. It brings together contributions from leading scholars in the interdisciplinary fields of architecture history, architecture theory, area studies, sociology and cultural studies. It interrogates Eurocentric views of modern architecture as autonomous and homogeneous and posits a heteronomous and heterogeneous understanding of modern architecture. Drawing from interdisciplinary theories, this book explores the complex relations between modernism, modernity and modernization and their entanglements with colonialism and postcolonialism, nationalism and development, globalization and regionalism. Closely examining the diverse cases of architectural modernisms in China, India, Indonesia, Singapore, Turkey, Brazil and South Africa, this book transcends the geographic division of labour in area studies to offer a broad comparative survey of modernisms beyond the West. It also covers heterogeneous temporalities of modernism today, tracing the continuities and discontinuities between the past and the present, from the proto-modern to the post-modern, from the west to the rest.

This book is an essential resource for understanding architectural modernism outside its “western” regions and mindsets. Its in-depth discussion and insights will be invaluable to specialists, academics and graduate students. It is also comprehensive enough to be used as a textbook for undergraduate students, and general enough for practitioners and the curious general reader.

• Interrogating Modernism and Modernities:
  • Modernism: Where We're At (and How We Got Here) (Anthony D King)
  • Modernism Across Hemisphere, or, Taking Internationalism Seriously (Mark Crinson)
  • Modernism & Contemporaneity in Architecture: Peripheries & Centres (Leon van Schaik, AO)
  • Entangled Histories of Modern Architecture (Duanfang Lu)
  • East, West, High, Low: How Brazilian Modernist Vernacular Problematizes It All (Fernando Luiz Lara)
• (Dis)Locating Modernisms in the World:
  • (Re-)Searching Modernism: Indonesia after Decolonization (Abidin Kusno)
  • Simultaneous Modernities: Contemporary Architecture in India (Rahul Mehrotra)
  • Opening the Concept of Critical Architecture: The Case of Modern China and the Issue of the State (Jianfei Zhu)
  • Agro-culture (Li Shiqiao)
  • Situated Modernism: The Production of Locality in Africa (Iain Low)
  • Politics of Greening: Spatial Constructions of the Public in Singapore (Eunice Seng)
  • Some Reflections on Hospitality and Cosmopolitanism Within the Context of the Early Republican Project of Modernization in Turkey (Zeynep Mennan)
  • Brazilian Architecture, Modern Tradition, Contemporary Culture: Other Brazilian Modernities of the 1950s–1970s (Ruth Verde Zein)
• Reflecting/Refracting Modernism:
  • Commentary: Multiple Modernisms and Modernities (Randolf S David)
  • Commentary: Centre and Periphery, a Singular Modernism and Studying Modern Cultural Production (C J Wan-Ling Wee)
  • Commentary: Mobility of Modernism (Chua Beng Huat)