Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture stands as a key modern manifesto whose influence extended to Japan and the emergence of the Metabolism movement in the late 1950s. Admired by Japanese architects trained in Le Corbusier’s Paris atelier, his ideas resonated strongly in postwar Tokyo, notably with the National Museum of Western Art (1959). In 1960, […]
Tag: 20th century – modern architecture
Architecture and Social Dreaming: Three Generations of Attempts to Revolutionize Architecture, from Le Corbusier to Ant Farm and Critical Speculative Design
The following paper analyzes three architectural manifestos from the 20th and early 21st centuries: Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture, Ant Farm Collective’s Inflatocookbook, and the more recent Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. Our approach to the texts uses a preliminary conceptualization of “capitalist modernities”. The paper […]
From Standardization to Chaos: Everyday Life in Architectural Manifestos
A vital factor shaping the social and cultural practices of the 20th century was research into the phenomenon of everyday life, which became a central theme in architectural manifestos of the time. This investigation of the quotidian serves as the foundation for comparative research into the successes and failures of two key manifestos: Towards a […]
The Whole City Is Covered with Greenery: Le Corbusier and His Vision of a New Urban Landscape
Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture is usually read as a manifesto promoting an engineering approach to architecture that is also a “limpid and impressive plastic fact”. Yet its complexity allows for further interpretations, including the neglected perspective of architecture’s relation to the landscape. The text contains numerous statements on the building-landscape relationship, urban planning […]
Towards the Manifesto: Tracing a Genre at the Crossroads of Architectural Theory and Practice
The paper addresses the ontological and epistemological problem of characterizing and defining the architectural manifesto and aims to identify the defining frameworks, conditions, and criteria of manifestos and their various physical embodiments in architecture. Several narrowly focused analytical perspectives are adopted to address what constitutes a manifesto and the traits for its identification: from a […]
Toward Le Corbusier’s Thinking in Vers une Architecture
The paper attempts to analyse the thought that lies behind the book Toward an Architecture. What are the typical methods of its reflection, where are its sources of inspiration, specifically which models and thinkers; how does it treat these conscious or unconscious borrowings, and how does it compose them into an original whole – as […]