Architecture and Revolution explores the consequences of the 1989 revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe from an architectural perspective. It presents new writings from a team of renowned architects, philosophers and cultural theorists from both the East and the West. They explore the questions over the built environment that now face architects, planners and politicians in the region. They examine the problems of buildings inherited from the communist era: some are environmentally inadequate, many were designed to serve a now redundant social programme and others carry the stigma of association with previous regimes. Contributors include: Daniel Libeskind, Bernard Tschumi, Laura Mulvey, Helene Cixous, Andrew Benjamin and Frederic Jameson.

The period following the Mexican Revolution was characterized by unprecedented artistic experimentation. Seeking to express the revolution's heterogeneous social and political aims, which were in a continuous state of redefinition, architects, artists, writers, and intellectuals created distinctive, sometimes idiosyncratic theories and works. Luis E. Carranza examines the interdependence of modern architecture in Mexico and the pressing sociopolitical and ideological issues of this period, as well as the interchanges between post-revolutionary architects and the literary, philosophical, and artistic avant-gardes. Organizing his book around chronological case studies that show how architectural theory and production reflected various understandings of the revolution's significance, Carranza focuses on architecture and its relationship to the philosophical and pedagogic requirements of the muralist movement, the development of the avant-garde in Mexico and its notions of the Mexican city, the use of pre-Hispanic architectural forms to address indigenous peoples, the development of a socially oriented architectural functionalism, and the monumentalization of the revolution itself. In addition, the book also covers important architects and artists who have been marginally discussed within architectural and art historiography. Richly illustrated, Architecture as Revolution is one of the first books in English to present a social and cultural history of early twentieth-century Mexican architecture.

By linking building theory to the emancipatory project of critique advanced by radical thinkers in our time, this work investigates the key conceptual and historical elements that culminate in an emancipatory theory of building entitled: 'Toward a philosophy of shelter’. Taking Marx as its only resource, this work proceeds with the conviction that our era is contemporaneous to Marx’s historical era. This means ‘not judging the validity of Marx from the perspective of the historical situation’, but rather, ‘demonstrating the validity of a Marxian perspective for a singular historical situation’, as ours. This work will therefore translate this perspective into seeing the situation of architecture through the eyes of Marx. All those concerned with the predicament in our current condition in which architecture must play a major social role in upholding the universal value of what Alain Badiou calls 'generic humanity' will take an interest in this work. In particular, architects, critics, scholars, and students inside the field of architecture who would be seeking the application of this universal value to a new theory of building will be a welcoming audience for this work.

Soon after leaving La Chaux-de-Fonds for Paris, Jeanneret, in association with the Purist painter Amedee Ozenfant, gained fame in the 1920s under the nom de plume Le Corbusier, publishing the journal L'Esprit Nouveau and four seminal Modernist tracts: Towards a New Architecture, The City of Tomorrow, The Decorative Art of Today, and La Peinture Moderne (Modern Painting).

This collaborative volume by architectural historians and research engineers provides fresh insights into the early builders' art.

This innovative history argues that we can understand important facets of the Mexican Revolution by analyzing the architecture designed and built in Mexico City during the formative years from 1920 to 1940. These artifacts allow us to trace and understand the path of the consolidation of the Mexican Revolution. Each individual building or development, by providing indelible evidence of the process by which the revolution evolved into a government, offers important insights into Mexican history. Seen in aggregate, they reveal an ongoing urban process at work; seen as a "composition," they reveal changes over time in societal values and aspirations and in the direction of the revolution. This book focuses on structure, change, and process for this remarkable city "in the true image of the gigantic heaven." The changes described in Fuentes' narrative are man-made, not wrought by impersonal or natural forces except on the rare occasions of earthquake and flood. Patrice Elizabeth Olsen views Mexico City as an artifact of those who created it—representing their ardor, humanity, and religion, as well as their politics. Individual chapters detail the expression of revolutionary values and aims in the physical form of Mexico City's built environment between 1920 and 1940, examining direction and meaning in terms of who is given license to design and build structures in the capital city, and equally important, who is excluded. Through the reshaping of the capital the revolution was extended and institutionalized; physical traces of the process of negotiation that enabled the revolution to be "fixed" in the Mexican polity appear in the city's skyline, parks, housing developments, and other new construction, as well as in modifications to existing colonial-era buildings. In this manner, the author argues, Mexico City's urban form crystallized as a product of the revolution as well as a part of the revolutionary process, as it has been of other conquests throughout its history.

Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806) is today regarded as chief representative of French revolutionary architecture. With his extraordinary inventiveness he projected the architectural ideals of his era. Ledoux’s influential buildings and projects are presented and interpreted both aesthetically and historically in this book. His best-known projects – the Royal Saltwords of Arc-et-Senans, the tollgates of Paris, the ideal city of Chaux – reveal the architect’s allegiance to the principles of antiquity and Renaissance but also illustrate the evolution of his own utopian language. With the French Revolution, Ledoux ceased building as his contemporaries perceived him as a royal architect. He focused on the development of his architectural theory and redefined the vision of the modern architect.

Conventional readings of the history of Soviet art and architecture show modernist utopian aspirations as all but prohibited by 1932 under Stalin's totalitarianism. Soviet Architectural Avant-Gardes challenges that view. Radically redefining the historiography of the period, it reveals how the relationship between the Party and practicing architects was much more complex and contradictory than previously believed, and shows, in contrast to the conventional scholarly narrative, how the architectural avant-garde was able to persist at a time when it is widely considered to have been driven underground. In doing so, this book provides an essential perspective on how to analyse, evaluate, and “re-imagine” the history of modernist expression in its cultural context. It offers a new understanding of ways in which 20th century social revolutions and their totalitarian sequels inflected the discourse of both modernity and modernism. The book relies on close analyses of archival documents and architectural works. Many of the documents have been rarely – if ever – discussed in English before, while the architectural projects include iconic works such as the Palace of Soviets and the Soviet Pavilion at the Paris 1937 World Exposition, as well as remarkable works that until now have been neglected by architectural historians inside and outside Russia. In a fascinating final chapter, it also reveals for the first time the details of Frank Lloyd Wright's triumphant welcome at the First Congress of Soviet Architects in Moscow in 1937, at the height of Stalin's Terror.