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Gabrielle Schaad, Torsten Lange (eds.)

archithese reader

Critical Positions in Search of Postmodernity, 1971–1976


Book design: Eliot Gisel and common-interest

English, faksimile pages German, English, French,
528 pages, ca. 240 images, 
17,3 × 21,8 cm, softcover with jacket

Euro (D) 68.–, Euro (A) 69.90

Available

ISBN 978-3-03863-059-3

CHF   68.00


→ Book launch in Kriens/Lucerne  (2.5), details here

The journal as a platform where different attitudes and perspectives meet – what role did archithese play in its time, what role does it play today?

•  A critical look at current and historical topics in architecture

This publication presents a selection of ground-breaking contributions, grouped thematically in a new way, which originally appeared in the journal archithese, accompanied by critical essays by contemporary authors.

Located in its specific context – the heterogeneous and turbulent landscape of debates in the years after 1968 – archithese did not only give local protagonists a voice, but it also established a transatlantic dialogue amongst architects, critics and spatial scientists. 
Among them were influential figures such as Rem Koolhaas, Aldo Rossi, the architecture collective Superstudio, Alan Colqhoun, Charles Jencks, Denise Scott Brown, Manfredo Tafuri and even Henri Lefèbvre.

The positions gathered here are exemplary for the pluralist approach and thematic openness characteristic for the way in which the art historian Stanislaus von Moos compiled the journal in its founding phase.
The thematic spectrum ranges from historicism, realism concepts in architecture, urbanism, user-oriented approaches to interest in informal and spontaneous building.

Arranged in five thematic chapters, the articles illustrate, in different ways, the examination of the incipient postmodernism and, due to their richness of facets, point far beyond a pure concept of style.

With contributions by:
Irina Davidovici, Samia Henni, Torsten Lange, Gabrielle Schaad, Marie Theres Stauffer, Stanislaus von Moos.


About the Editors

Gabrielle Schaad Gabrielle Schaad is an art historian and postdoc at the Chair of Theory and History of Architecture, Art, and Design, TU Munich. She coordinates the study program Exhibiting and Making Public at the Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK, where she is a Lecturer and Curator in the Bachelor Fine Arts. 
Her doctoral thesis received from the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), ETH Zurich, focused on techniques aimed at emancipation in art and architecture and their pitfalls, transforming space-time in Cold War Japan [“Performing Environmental Textures – Intersected Bodies of Gutai and Metabolism (Japan, 1955–1972)”].
She has been awarded research scholarships by the SNSF, the MEXT Japan (2013–2015), and Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart. In addition to her monograph Shizuko Yoshikawa (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2018) and academic contributions, she recently co-edited Care: gta papers 7 (Zurich: gta Verlag, 2022).

Torsten Lange is Lecturer in Cultural and Architectural History at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Switzerland. He studied architecture as well as the history and theory of architecture at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and The Bartlett School of Architecture in London, where he received his PhD in 2015.
His work focuses on the conditions underpinning the production of the built environment during late socialism and on writing histories of queer spatial practices. He is co-editor of Re-Framing Identities: Architecture’s Turn to History (Basel, Berlin: Birkhäuser, 2017), the special issue “Architectural Historiography and Fourth Wave Feminism” of Architectural Histories (8/2020), and of Care: gta papers 7 (Zurich: gta Verlag, 2022), and published several essays and articles.

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