The Visibility of Modernization in Architecture: A Debate

This edited collection explores the visibility of modernization in architecture produced in different capitalist regions across the world and provides readers with a historico-theoretical and historico-geographical discussion.

Focusing on a particular building type, an influential architect’s work, as well as relevant texts and documents, each chapter addresses the many facets of "delay" which are central to the problematization of capitalism’s progressive dissemination of technological and aesthetic regimes of modernism. This collection underlines the centrality of temporality for a critical understanding of colonialism, modernism, and capitalism. The book is primarily concerned with the historical timeline, the tangential point when a nation enters modernization processes. In exploring modernism in diverse regions such as East Asia, Pacific, Eastern Europe, and Iran, each chapter addresses the historiographic and architectonic unfolding of modernization beyond the western hemisphere.

The exploration of these diverse case-studies will be of interest to students of architecture and researchers working on the collision of temporalities and the subject's critical importance for different country’s built-environments.

Chapter 13 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Gevork Hartoonian is Emeritus Professor of architectural history at the University of Canberra, Australia, and holds a Ph. D from the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He has taught in American universities, including Pratt Institute and Columbia University, NYC. Hartoonian is most recently the author of Towards a Critique of Architecture’s Contemporaneity: 4 Essays (Routledge 2023), Reading Kenneth Frampton: A Commentary on Modern Architecture 1980 (Anthem Press 2022), and Time, History and Architecture: essays on critical historiography (Routledge 2020/2018). His previous publications include, among others, Architecture and Spectacle: a critique (Routledge, 2016/2012) and The Mental Life of the Architectural Historian (2013). The Korean and Thai edition of his Ontology of Construction (Cambridge University Press, 1994) was published in 2010 and 2017.