Rethinking Global Modernism: Architectural Historiography and the Postcolonial

This anthology collects developing scholarship that outlines a new decentred history of global modernism in architecture using postcolonial and other related theoretical frameworks.

By both revisiting the canons of modernism and seeking to decolonize and globalize those canons, the volume explores what a genuinely ＂global＂ history of architectural modernism might begin to look like. Its chapters explore the historiography and weaknesses of modernism’s normative interpretations and propose alternatives to them. The collection offers essays that interrogate transnationalism in new ways, reconsiders the agency of the subaltern and the roles played by infrastructures, materials, and global institutions in propagating a diversity of modernisms internationally. Issues such as colonial modernism, architectural pedagogy, cultural imperialism, and spirituality are engaged.

With essays from both established scholars and up-and-coming researchers, this is an important reference for a new understanding of this crucial and developing topic.

Vikramaditya Prakash is an architect and an architectural historian and theorist. He is a professor of architecture and associate dean for academic affairs at the University of Washington, Seattle. Prakash is the host of the ArchitectureTalk podcast and co-design lead at the Office of Uncertainty Research. His recent books include Colonial Modernities: Building, Dwelling and Architecture in British India and Ceylon (edited with Peter Scriver) (Routledge, 2007), The Architecture of Shivdatt Sharma and Chandigarh: An Architectural Guide　(Mapin, 2012), and One Continuous Line: Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Aditya Prakash (Mapin, 2021).　

Maristella Casciato is an architect and architectural historian and is Senior Curator of Architecture at the Getty Research Institute (since 2016). She was Mellon Senior Fellow at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal (2010) prior to being appointed Associate Director of Research at the same institute (2012-15). She has taught the history of architecture in Italy and in the United States. Since the late 1990s she has been engaged in a research project on Pierre Jeanneret and the planning of Chandigarh in postcolonial India. On this topic she has curated a few exhibitions and contributed to the publication of catalogues and essays.

Daniel E. Coslett is a scholar of colonial and postcolonial architecture and urbanism whose work addresses the intersections of architecture and urban planning, preservation, archaeology, and tourism in North Africa. Hereceived a PhD in the history and theory of built environments from the University of Washington and an MA in the subject from Cornell University. Coslett has taught art and architectural history at Western Washington University and the University of Washington. His edited volume entitled Neocolonialism and Built Heritage: Echoes of Empire in Africa, Asia, and Europe (Routledge) was published in 2020. He is an associate editor at the International Journal of Islamic Architecture.