Modernism and the Spirit of the City

Modernism and the Spirit of the City offers a new reading of the architectural modernism that emerged and flourished in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Rejecting the fashionable postmodernist arguments of the 1980s and '90s which damned modernist architecture as banal and monotonous, this collection of essays by eminent scholars investigates the complex cultural, social, and religious imperatives that lay below the smooth, white surfaces of new architecture.

Iain Boyd Whyte is Professor of Architectural History at the University of Edinburgh. He has written extensively on early-modernist history and theory, with books on Bruno Taut, Hendrik Petrus Berlage, and the school of Otto Wagner. Among his current projects is an anthology of texts on the German-speaking metropolis, 1880-1940.