1st Edition
Nelson Goodman and Modern Architecture A Belated Encounter
This book orchestrates a convergence of two discourses from the 1960s—Nelson Goodman’s aesthetic theory on one side, and critiques of modern architecture articulated by figures like Peter Blake, Charles Jencks, and Robert Venturi/Denise Scott Brown on the other. Grounded in Goodman’s aesthetic theory, the book explores his conceptual framework within the context of modern architecture.
At the heart of the investigation lies Goodman’s concept of exemplification. While his notion of denotation pertains to representational elements, often ornaments, in architecture, exemplification accentuates specific formal properties at the expense of others, including color, spatial orientation, transparency, seriality, etc. Supplemented by findings from phenomenology, the book traces these effects in buildings, notably those by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright—all key figures in the critiques of modern architecture.
Employing Goodman’s framework, the book aims to address accusations of emptiness and alienation directed at modern architecture in the post-war era. It illustrates that modern architecture symbolizes aesthetically in a fundamentally different way than architecture from earlier periods.
This book will be of interest to architects, artists, researchers, and students in architecture, architectural history, theory, cultural theory, philosophy, and aesthetics.
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction
Reckoning with the critique of modern architecture
A Goodmanian take on modern architecture and its critiques
Defining the object of study
Problems of demarcation
The ideological basis for modern architecture in functionalist theory
Current research into the praxis of modern architecture
Chapter 2: Applying Goodman’s aesthetic theory to architecture
Aesthetics and cognition
Aesthetics and language
Goodman as nominalist
Right or wrong rather than true or false
When does architecture take place? Goodman’s rejection of competing theories
- Languages of Art
Symbol systems and symbol schemes
Syntactic and semantic, notation, digital and analog
- Imperfect notational systems: Notational schemes
Allographic, autographic and the steps of the design process
Notational approaches: Score and script
Notation and mixed symbol systems in architecture
Denotation
- Fictitious denotation
Exemplification
- Exemplification in modern architecture
Expression (metaphorical exemplification)
- Feelings or moods?
Complex and mediate modes of reference: Allusion, variation, style
- Allusion
- Variation
- Style
Chapter 3: Symbolization in pre-modern architecture
Renaissance architecture
Mannerist architecture
Baroque architecture
Rococo architecture
Neoclassical architecture
Romanticist impulses
Historicist architecture
Chapter 4: Symbolization in the early phases of modern architecture
The Chicago School
- Wainwright Building
Art Nouveau, Jugendstil, Wiener Secession, and Catalan Modernisme
- Maison Coilliot
- Maison Horta
- Majolikahaus
- Casa Milà
- Willow Tearooms
Adolf Loos
- Looshaus
Expressionist architecture
- Het Schip
- Einsteinturm
Glass architecture
Chapter 5: The aesthetic implications of the critique of modern architecture
The International Style exhibition in 1932 as a compass
The aesthetically oriented critique of modern architecture, circa 1970
Chapter 6: Symbolization in modern architecture
The International Style: Mies van der Rohe and the minimalism of glass and steel
- Illinois Institute of Technology
- General means of aesthetic symbolization in Mies’ formalistic architecture
The International Style: Gropius, Bauhaus, and the factory aesthetic
- The Bauhaus building in Dessau
- Late works by Gropius
- Formalism and classicism in American federal and corporate International Style
The International Style: Le Corbusier and Purism
- Les Quartiers Modernes Frugès in Pessac
- The white, cubist aesthetic of the villas of Loos and Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier’s late works and the Brutalism of béton brut
- Unité d’habitation in Marseille
- Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp
- The imprint of Brutalism on late modernism
Frank Lloyd Wright and organic modernism
- Late works by Wright
- Fallingwater
- From Alvar Aalto to the notion of another modernism
Chapter 7: Conclusion
The hegemony of exemplification in modern architectural praxis
The architecture of formalism: symbolic rather than silent
Bibliography
Index
Biography
Kasper Lægring is a theorist of architecture and the arts, a curator, and currently a New Carlsberg Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Art History at Aarhus University. With research degrees in architecture (MS, University of Pennsylvania; PhD, The Royal Danish Academy School of Architecture) and art history (Mag.art., University of Copenhagen), he has received recognition such as the Gold Medal of the University of Copenhagen. His studies and research have been supported by numerous prestigious institutions, including the J. William Fulbright Commission, the New Carlsberg Foundation, and the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius. Some recent notable publications include contributions to A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries (Brill, 2022) and The Contested Territory of Architectural Theory (Routledge, 2022).
