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With new research on building programs in political, religious, and domestic settings in the United States and Europe, this collection of essays offers a fresh look at postwar modernism and the role that architecture played in constructing modern identities.

In the decades following World War II, modern architecture spread around the globe alongside increased modernization, urbanization, and postwar reconstruction—and it eventually won widespread acceptance. But as the limitations of conventional conceptions of modernism became apparent, modern architecture has come under increasing criticism. In this collection of essays, experienced and emerging scholars take a fresh look at postwar modern architecture by asking what it meant to be “modern,” what role modern architecture played in constructing modern identities, and who sanctioned (or was sanctioned by) modernism in architecture.

This volume presents focused case studies of modern architecture in three realms—political, religious, and domestic—that address our very essence as human beings. Several essays explore developments in Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia and document a modernist design culture that crossed political barriers, such as the Iron Curtain, more readily than previously imagined. Other essays investigate various efforts to reconcile the concerns of modernist architects with the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church and other Christian institutions. And a final group of essays looks at postwar homebuilding in the United States and demonstrates how malleable and contested the image of the American home was in the mid-twentieth century. These inquiries show the limits of canonical views of modern architecture and reveal instead how civic institutions, ecclesiastical traditions, individual consumers, and others sought to sanction the forms and ideas of modern architecture in the service of their respective claims or desires to be modern.

Recovers the untold history of how the Global South cooperated to construct its own modernity. 

During the era of decolonization, architecture began to travel along unprecedented paths. Newly independent nations in the Global South did not only build within their own borders; they built with one another, exchanging designs, experts, materials, and entire construction technologies across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Exchanges operated through a range of formal frameworks, from the Non-Aligned Movement to the Afro-Asian Housing Organization, but also through a dense weave of professional and personal networks, connecting Bandung and Cairo to Kampala, Colombo, and Havana.

South-South considers architecture as a form of “worldmaking,” by which postcolonial nations imagined and materialized alternatives to both colonial legacies and Cold War binaries. Organized around the lenses of staging, cooperation, and mobilities, the contributions attend as much to lofty solidarities as to pragmatic necessities and persistent Northern dependencies, all of which shaped architecture on the ground. The result reframes modern architectural history, not as a story of influence flowing south, but of lateral exchange among so-called peripheries, an unfinished project whose stakes have only grown as the Global South reasserts itself today.