Architecture and Ugliness: Anti-Aesthetics and the Ugly in Postmodern Architecture - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1350068233 ISBN 13: 9781350068230

Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020

Synopsis

Whatever 'ugliness' is, it remains a problematic category in architectural aesthetics - alternately vilified and appropriated, either to shock or to invert conventions of architecture.

This book presents eighteen new essays which rethink ugliness in architecture - from brutalism to eclectic postmodern architectural productions - and together offer a diverse reappraisal of the history and theory of postmodern architecture and design. The essays address both broad theoretical questions on ugliness and postmodern aesthetics, as well as more specific analyses of significant architectural examples dating from the last decades of the twentieth century, addressing the relation between the aesthetic register of ugliness and aesthetic concepts such as brutalism, kitsch, the formless, ad hoc-ism, the monstrous, or the grotesque.

The aim of this volume is not simply to document the history of a postmodern anti-aesthetic through case studies. Instead, it aims to shed light on an aesthetic problem that has been largely overlooked in the agenda of architectural theory, the question if and how ugliness can be of interest to architecture; or if and how architecture can make good use of ugliness.

About this title

About the Authors

Wouter Van Acker is Associate Professor in Architectural Theory and History at the Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.

Thomas Mical is Associate Professor of Architecture and Acting Associate Head of School for Research: Art, Architecture, and Design at the University of South Australia. He is the author of Surrealism and Architecture (Routledge, 2005).

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1350068233
• ISBN 13: 9781350068230
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304
• Editor: Acker Wouter Van, Mical Thomas