Karl Langer: Modern Architect and Migrant in the Australian Tropics (Bloomsbury Studies in Modern Architecture) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1350068101 ISBN 13: 9781350068100

Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2022

Synopsis

Despite a European training and an early career working with Peter Behrens, a migration from Vienna to the Australian state of Queensland positioned the architect Karl Langer (1903-1969) at the very edge of both European and Australian modernism. Confronted by tropical heat and glare, the economics of affordable housing, fiercely proud and regional architectural practices, and a suspicion of the foreign, Langer moulded the European language of international modernism to the unique climatic and social conditions of tropical Australia.

This book will tell Langer's story through a series of edited essays focused on key themes and projects. Published as part of the Bloomsbury Studies in Modern Architecture series, which brings to light the work of significant yet overlooked modernist architects, it is both an examination of an architect's work and international legacy, and also a case study in the trans-global dissemination of design ideas.

Studying the architect's built and proposed work, both regional and metropolitan, the scale and reach of Langer's practice will be considered for the first time, showing how, given his continued influence on the contemporary culture of tropical design, Langer has been unjustly ignored by the historiography of both Australian and Modernist architecture to date.

About this title

About the Authors

Professor Tom Avermaete is Chair of the History and Theory of Urban Design at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. His research focuses on the architecture of the city and the changing roles, approaches and tools of architects and urban designers from a cross-cultural perspective. Avermaete is editor of OASE. Journal of Architecture and member of the advisory board of the Architecture Theory Review and Docomomo Journal.

Dr. Deborah van der Plaat is a Senior Research Fellow in Architecture at the University of Queensland (Australia). Her research examines the architecture of nineteenth and twentieth century Australia and its intersection with theories of artistic agency, climate, place, migration and race. Writing histories of Queensland architecture is also a focus within her work.

John Macarthur is Professor of Architecture and Director of Research in the School of Architecture, the University of Queensland, Australia.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1350068101
• ISBN 13: 9781350068100
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 328
• Editor: Plaat Deborah Van Der, Macarthur John