Laughing at Architecture

Architectural Histories of Humour, Satire and Wit

Buch | Softcover

288 Seiten

2020
Bloomsbury Visual Arts (Verlag)
978-1-350-17049-0 (ISBN)

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In a media-saturated world, humour stands out as a form of social communication that is especially effective in re-appropriating and questioning architectural and urban culture. Whether illuminating the ambivalences of metropolitan life or exposing the shock of modernisation, cartoons, caricature, and parody have long been potent agents of architectural criticism, protest and opposition.

In a novel contribution to the field of architectural history, this book outlines a survey of visual and textual humour as applied to architecture, its artefacts and leading professionals. Employing a wide variety of visual and literary sources (prints, the illustrated press, advertisements, theatrical representations, cinema and TV), thirteen essays explore an array of historical subjects concerning the critical reception of projects, buildings and cities through the means of caricature and parody. Subjects range from 1750 to the present, and from Europe and the USA to contemporary China. From William Hogarth and George Cruikshank to Osbert Lancaster, Adolf Loos’ satire, and Saul Steinberg’s celebrated cartoons of New York City, graphic and descriptive humour is shown to be an enormously fruitful, yet largely unexplored terrain of investigation for the architectural and urban historian.

Michela Rosso is Associate Professor of Architecture at the Politechnico di Torino, Italy. In 2014 she was elected General Chair of the Advisory Board of the European Architectural History Network, and in 2016 she was awarded a residential fellowship at the Yale Center for British Art.

List of Figures
List of Contributors

Introduction, Michela Rosso

1. Laughing at the Baroque: A Drawing and Some Texts Compared, Susanna Pasquali

2. From Reportage to Ridicule: Satirizing the Building Industry in the Eighteenth-century Irish Press, Conor Lucey

3. The Thorn of Scorn: John Nash and his All Souls Church for a Transformed Regency London, Daniela Roberts

4. 'A Joke that has Gone on Far too Long': Mocking the Completion of the New Hôtel des Postes de Paris (1886–1888), Guy Lambert

5. Deconstructing Gaudí: Intertwined Relationships between Satire and Architectural Criticism, Josep-Maria Garcia-Fuentes

6. Confronting Problems with a Sense of Humour: Adolf Loos’s Architectural Polemics and Viennese
Journalism, Ruth Hanisch

7. Words and Images of Contempt: Il Selvaggio on Architecture (1926–1942), Michela Rosso

8. Osbert Lancaster: Architectural Humour in the Time of Functionalism, Alan Powers

9. Irrational Interiors: The Modern Domestic Landscape Seen in Caricatures, Gabriele Neri

10. From ‘Little Russia’ (Klein Rusland) to ‘Planet of the Apes’ (De Apenplaneet): Nicknaming Twentieth-century Mass Housing in Belgium, Evert Vandeweghe

11. Saul Steinberg’s Graph Paper Architecture: Humorous Drawings and Diagrams as Instruments of Critique, Christoph Lueder

12. The Modern City Through the Mirror of Humour: A Different Portrait, Olivier Ratouis

13. Splendid?! Preposterous! Chinese Artists Mock the Architectural Spectacle, Angela Becher

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	11.12.2019
Zusatzinfo	73 bw illus
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Gewicht	460 g
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften
Themenwelt	Technik ► Architektur
ISBN-10	1-350-17049-6 / 1350170496
ISBN-13	978-1-350-17049-0 / 9781350170490
Zustand	Neuware