Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture stands as a key modern manifesto whose influence extended to Japan and the emergence of the Metabolism movement in the late 1950s. Admired by Japanese architects trained in Le Corbusier’s Paris atelier, his ideas resonated strongly in postwar Tokyo, notably with the National Museum of Western Art (1959). In 1960, Metabolism was articulated by Kikutake, Kurokawa, Maki, and Kawazoe as a vision of architecture capable of growth and change. This paper argues that Vers une Architecture constitutes a latent theoretical basis of the Metabolism Manifesto, analysing both texts through shared concerns with technology, poetics, organic growth, and the cultural transfer between East and West.
The following paper analyzes three architectural manifestos from the 20th and early 21st centuries: Le Corbusier's Toward an Architecture, Ant Farm Collective's Inflatocookbook, and the more recent Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. Our approach to the texts uses a preliminary conceptualization of "capitalist modernities". The paper argues that capitalist modernities are not a mere aesthetic style or monolithic historical period but a continuously evolving, self-critical sociocultural condition that propels architecture's evolution and its socially oriented conscience. To maintain its modern character, new architecture engages in political critique, prompting professionals to shift from practical concerns towards more imaginative and speculative applications of architectural knowledge. By tracing this trajectory, the paper emphasizes the persistent struggle within architecture to assert political agency amidst the forces of modernities.
A vital factor shaping the social and cultural practices of the 20th century was research into the phenomenon of everyday life, which became a central theme in architectural manifestos of the time. This investigation of the quotidian serves as the foundation for comparative research into the successes and failures of two key manifestos: Toward an Architecture (Le Corbusier, 1923), which standardizes everyday life, making it rational and normative, and Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (Rem Koolhaas,1978), which deconstructs everyday life, leaving it dynamic and chaotic. The aim is to explore whether everyday life contains consistent elements capable of generating new architectural manifestos.
The paper addresses the ontological and epistemological problem of characterizing and defining the architectural manifesto and aims to identify the defining frameworks, conditions, and criteria of manifestos and their various physical embodiments in architecture. Several narrowly focused analytical perspectives are adopted to address what constitutes a manifesto and the traits for its identification: from a general definition of the term manifesto toward its specific utilization as an attribute or category of primarily textual declarative expressions, and ultimately to a specific segment of the genre that aims to define the future direction of architectural thinking and practice.
The paper attempts to analyse the thought that lies behind the book Toward an Architecture. What are the typical methods of its reflection, where are its sources of inspiration, specifically which models and thinkers; how does it treat these conscious or unconscious borrowings, and how does it compose them into an original whole-as clearly the book is informed by a certain characteristic, if syncretic, way of thinking. As such, the study attempts to contribute to an understanding of the thinking that guided the European avant-garde at the time and influenced much of Western architectural thought in the following century.
Le Corbusier's Vers une architecture stands as a key modern manifesto whose influence extended to Japan and the emergence of the Metabolism movement in the late 1950s. Admired by Japanese architects trained in Le Corbusier's Paris atelier, his ideas resonated strongly in postwar Tokyo, notably with the National Museum of Western Art (1959). In 1960, Metabolism was articulated by Kikutake, Kurokawa, Maki, and Kawazoe as a vision of architecture capable of growth and change. This paper argues that Vers une architecture constitutes a latent theoretical basis of the Metabolism Manifesto, analysing both texts through shared concerns with technology, poetics, organic growth, and the cultural transfer between East and West.
Le Corbusier's Toward an Architecture is usually read as a manifesto promoting an engineering approach to architecture that is also a "limpid and impressive plastic fact". Yet its complexity allows for further interpretations, including the neglected perspective of architecture's relation to the landscape. The text contains numerous statements on the building-landscape relationship, urban planning and greenery, and the integration of house and garden. This study examines the manifesto from the viewpoint of landscape and garden architecture to enrich our understanding of Le Corbusier's thinking, which existing literature has addressed more through his projects rather than his writings.
The article analyzes and compares Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture, Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction, and Rem Koolhaas’s S, M, L, XL, considering the nature of their manifestness and biblicality reflected in past and present writings in both canonical and de-canonical, sacralizing and desacralizing ways. The three architectural writings under discussion are interpreted as approaches to the categories of utopian manifesto, gentle manifesto, and finally retroactive manifesto, or implicit-explicit (multi)manifesto. None of the three books interpreted is a “pure manifesto”. Like the Bible, they are multi-genre volumes; similarly, in all three texts, not only do diverse genres and modes of writing – ranging from journalistic to scientific, theoretical, and literary – intersect and interrelate, but they also bring into dialogue varied ways of thinking and practicing architecture, all while maintaining a past-present-future orientation.
This article explores the lesser-known furniture designs of Alfred Neumann, a visionary modernist architect whose innovative thinking shaped postwar architecture in Israel and beyond. Focusing on a modular chair designed by Neumann for the Slez & aacute;k villa in Brno in the 1930s, the study investigates its structural and proportional relationship to his later architectural works. Through qualitative research, including on-site documentation and interviews, the article situates the chair within Neumann's broader spatial theories, particularly his EM-PHI proportional system developed in his publication The Humanization of Space (1956). It argues that Neumann's architectural language, based on modularity, prefabrication, and human-centered dimensions, was already present in his early furniture; hence the chair exemplifies his consistent design philosophy and forms a link to his iconic buildings such as the Mitzpe Ramon synagogue. By examining this overlooked area of his oeuvre, the article contributes new insights into Neumann's holistic approach to architecture and design, enriching the historiography of modern architecture.
The paper investigates three projects of the Hungarian state design firm BUV & Aacute;TI: the Inner-City Shopping Centre, the Fontana department store and the K & iacute;gy & oacute; Passage, interpreting these works as mock-ups of capitalism, where a socialist society could practice and act out consumerism. Designed and built to converge towards a part-imagined West, these phantasmagorical visions of capitalism from the eastern perspective nonetheless proved to be unfitting after the regime change. The shedding of a socialist Eastern European identity and the immersion in a new capitalist identity demanded a change in the architectural setting, here depicted on the sociocultural, economic and architectural levels.
The article explores the formative years (1948-1953) of Stavoprojekt, the largest state design institution in state-socialist Czechoslovakia. As part of an ongoing research project, it traces organizational changes using the previously inaccessible archive of the Stavoprojekt Directorate, now held in the National Archives of the Czech Republic. The research is based mainly on the analysis of this fund, which contains fragmentary documents of Stavoprojekt's operations. The state of the fund itself reflects the early development of the Stavoprojekt organization: inconsistent, ambiguous and chaotic. This article aims to clarify the milestones of this development by relating this material to the contemporary literature, periodicals, and legal changes in the fields of architecture and construction.
The Athenaeum is an architectural genre adopted in the wake of Romania's extensive and accelerated processes of modernization at the end of the 19th century. Like many other civilizational forms of the West, it was introduced to span the developmental gap after the nation's long Ottoman rule and emphasize the new direction towards humanistic values and a rational society. However, the Athenaeum did not retain the status of a foreign form but instead launched into motion the forces eager for emancipation and progress of Romania, playing an active role in the decisive stages of affirming its national identity.
In 1925, the first architecture graduates completed their studies at the two technical universities in Brno-the Czech and the German institutions. Among them was Maximili & aacute;n Scheer. The existence of a significant body of unique written and visual archival materials reveals not only details about the course of Scheer's studies, his pedagogical guidance, and the historical and artistic context of the era and the city-all of which fundamentally shaped the personality of the young aspiring architect-but also sheds light on his classmates and friends, with whom he would later embark on professional careers in architecture. This study, dedicated to Scheer's student years, also offers a critical perspective on the professional training of an entire generation, one that shaped the trajectory of Czechoslovak architecture for several decades.
In the interwar period, various European countries saw attempts to turn the building of houses from a craft-based endeavor to industrialized machine production. One of these attempts was the Oce & lcaron;ov & yacute; dom [Steel House] company in Bratislava, formed in the late 1920s to produce prefabricated steel-frame houses. Drawing upon strong ambition and powerful industrial backing, and emboldened by its early successes, the company nonetheless soon began to struggle and eventually was forced to leave the scene. Far from achieving the widespread impact it had envisioned, Steel House remained only a short-lived episode in the turbulent development of construction in the interwar period.
This study examines the enduring legacy of Eliel Saarinen's boulevard concept, originally proposed in his 1918 Greater Helsinki Project, and its influence on Helsinki's urban planning over the past century. Although the boulevard was never realized, Saarinen's vision was instrumental in the city's development, setting a precedent for subsequent urban design initiatives. Through analysis of a series of urban plans from the early 20th century to the present, this article traces the sociopolitical dynamics that have continuously redefined Helsinki's urban landscape. Examining both the realized and the unrealized designs, the study demonstrates how Saarinen's ideas have been adapted, contested, and ultimately integrated into the city's spatial organization. The article offers a deeper understanding of Helsinki's urban planning history, providing insights into the interplay between visionary design and practical implementation in shaping contemporary cities.
At the start of the millennium, many settlements that were originally villages at the suburban edge of Prague saw their populations multiply several times, yet without corresponding growth in the capacity of civic infrastructure and accompanied by a notable erosion of social cohesion or local identity. This study draws parallels between two radically diverging paths followed, thanks to decisive mayors and "their" architects, by two originally small historic villages: L & iacute;beznice and Doln & iacute; B & rcaron;e & zcaron;any. It examines the entire range of actors standing behind the development of these two settlements, their differing visions for the future, the social capital (Bourdieu) and processes leading to their fulfilment, and the current physical forms of both settlements.
