Title & Author:

Architecture and ugliness : anti-aesthetics and the ugly in postmodern architecture / edited by Wouter Van Acker and Thomas Mical.

Publication:

London ; New York : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020.

Description:

xiv, 285 pages : illustrations (black and white), map, plan ; 24 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Ugliness, the anti-aesthetic and appropriation : with some remarks on the architecture of ARM / John Macarthur -- On ugliness (in architecture) / Bart Verschaffel -- Instrumentalizing ugliness : parallels between High Victorian and Brutalist architecture / Timothy M. Rohan -- Monstrous becomings : a minor cartography / Heidi Sohn -- Traces of ugliness in Bofill's Les espaces d'Abraxas / Thomas Mical -- Post-communism and the monstrous : Skopje 2014 and other political tales / Mirjana Lozanovska -- Here be monsters / Andrew Leach -- To make monsters / Caroline O'Donnell -- 'Ugly" : the architecture of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown / Deborah Fausch -- Camp ugliness : the case of Charles W. Moore / Patricia A. Morton -- Architecture in El Alto : the politics of excess / Elisabetta Andreoli -- The critical kitsch of Alchimia and Memphis : design by media / AnnMarie Brennan -- The immediacy of urban reality in post-war Italy : between neorealism's and Tendenza's instrumentalization of ugliness / Marianna Charitonidou -- Ugliness as aesthetic friction : renewing architecture against the grain / Lara Schrijver -- Ugliness, or the cathetic moment of modulation between terror and the comic in postmodern architecture / Wouter Van Acker.

Summary:

"Whatever 'ugliness' is, it remains a problematic category in architectural aesthetics - alternately vilified and appropriated, either to shock or to invert conventions of architecture. This book presents eighteen new essays which rethink ugliness in architecture - from brutalism to eclectic postmodern architectural productions - and together offer a diverse reappraisal of the history and theory of postmodern architecture and design. The essays address both broad theoretical questions on ugliness and postmodern aesthetics, as well as more specific analyses of significant architectural examples dating from the last decades of the twentieth century, addressing the relation between the aesthetic register of ugliness and aesthetic concepts such as brutalism, kitsch, the formless, ad hoc-ism, the monstrous, or the grotesque. The aim of this volume is not simply to document the history of a postmodern anti-aesthetic through case studies. Instead, it aims to shed light on an aesthetic problem that has been largely overlooked in the agenda of architectural theory, the question if and how ugliness can be of interest to architecture; or if and how architecture can make good use of ugliness"-- Provided by publisher.

ISBN:

9781350068230 (hardback)
1350068233 (hardback)
(pdf)
9781350068247
(epub)
9781350068254
9781350068261

Subject:

Architecture, Postmodern.
Architecture Aesthetics.
Architecture postmoderne.
Architecture Esthétique.
Postmodern.

Added entries:

Acker, Wouter Van, editor.
Mical, Thomas, 1965- editor.

Architecture & ugliness
Anti-aesthetics and the ugly in postmodern architecture

Holdings:

Location: Library main 307778
Call No.: BIB 253261
Status: Available