Rethinking Modernism and the Built Environment

by Almantas Samalavicius (Author, Editor)

This volume is a passionate scholarly inquiry focused on some of the most pressing issues confronting contemporary architectural practice, urbanism, and city-making. Presented in the form of conversations with leading architects, urbanists, and internationally renowned architectural historians and urban thinkers, this concise book reviews and critiques the legacy of Modernism and its impact on global urbanisation. Timely, thoughtful and thought-provoking, these conversations, conducted by the editor during the last few years, urge the rejection of some of the most widespread dogmas and often dangerously limiting and misguided intellectual legacies of urban and architectural thinking. The contributors recommend a search instead for more enlightened architectural practices, urban planning, and city-making in the new millennium, when environmental problems have become particularly pressing. In this volume, readers will find not only glimpses into possible urban futures, but a thorough review of what now often appear as the shackles of the not-so-distant Modernist past.

"Rife with sharp thinking and in-your-face pronouncements (Was budding astronomer Carl Sagan really part of Cold-War research to blow up the moon?), Rethinking Modernism and the Built Environment is nothing if not evidence that a lot of smart people are intensely interested in an urban world that has changed and continues to change."Gordon BockArchitectural historianTraditional Building magazine, 16.08.2017

Dr Almantas Samalavicius is Professor at the School of Architecture at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Lithuania, and Professor at the Department of English at Vilnius University, Lithuania. He is the author of 12 scholarly books, including Ideas and Structures: Essays in Architectural History (2011) and the editor of ten collections of essays and academic articles and anthologies. His books, essays and articles have been translated into some 14 languages, and have appeared in such internationally acclaimed journals as Apollo and Partisan Review.