Third World Modernism ─ Architecture, Development and Identity

This set of essays brings together studies that challenge interpretations of the development of modernist architecture in Third World countries during the Cold War. The topics look at modernism’s part in the transnational development of building technologies and the construction of national and cultural identity. Architectural modernism is far more than another instance of Western expansionist aspirations; it has been developed in cross-cultural spaces and variously localized into nation-building programs and social welfare projects.
The first volume to address countries right across the developing world, this book has a key place in the historiography of modern architecture, dealing with non-Western traditions.

Duanfang Lu is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney and author of Remaking Chinese Urban Form: Modernity, Scarcity and Space, 1949–2005.

1. Introduction: Architecture, Development, and IdentityPart 1: The Will of the Age 2. The Other Way Around: The Modernist Movement in Brazil3. Contesting Modernism in Morocco 4.Agrupacion Espacio and the CIAM Peru Group: Architecture and the City in the Peruvian Modern ProjectPart 2: Building the Nation 5. Campus Architecture as Nation Building: Israeli Architect Arieh Sharon’s Obademi Awolowo University Campus, Ile-Ife, Nigeria6. Modernity and Revolution: The Architecture of Ceylon’s 20th Century Exhibitions7. This Is Not an American House: Good Sense Modernism in 1950s Turkey Part 3: Entangled Modernities 8. Modernity Transfers: The MoMA and Postcolonial India9. Building a (Post)Colonial Technoscientific Network: Tropical Architecture, Building Science and the Politics of Decolonization10. Otto Koenigsberger and the Tropicalization of British Architectural Culture 11. Epilogue: Third World Modernism, or Just Modernism: Towards a Cosmopolitan Reading of Modernism