March 2, 2007
School of Architecture
The University of Texas at Austin
Keynote Speaker
Dennis Doordan
Professor and Chair, Department of Art, Art History and Design
Professor, School of Architecture
University of Notre Dame
The history of modernism in architecture has by now been told many times over. While reductive partisan histories have been subjected to rigorous critique, a fuller picture has emerged only to result in a multiplication of modernisms: canonical, alternative, regional, and otherwise. The very conception of modernism as a historical phenomenon remains unclear. Ever present, however, is the issue of identity.
It is our conviction that the interrelation between modernism and identity—including the production, development, and interpretation of each—is in need of focused and systematic study. The years following the Second World War constitute a distinctively rich period for such study, as the now impoverished canonical view of modernism became broadly settled in these years, even as its ideal came under attack from many quarters. As historians have only recently begun to turn their attention to this period, it remains largely unstudied and full of opportunities for discovery.
One particularly promising aspect of this period is the manifold ways in which modernism was sanctioned by, or itself sanctioned, a wide range of institutions, classes, and communities. Such sanctioning was often partial, ambivalent, and contested, yet it remains an insufficiently studied element of the changing formation of modern identities that involve but extend beyond architecture. The symposium we propose would address three specific settings of sanctioning modernism:
- political appropriation of modernism in official institutional architecture
- religious appropriation of modernism in ecclesiastical architecture in light of liturgical reform and theological modernism
- consumer appropriation of modernism in middle class residential architecture and furnishings
