Search results for ""Author Jean-François Lejeune""

Post-Civil War Spain used the countryside as locus and symbol for the reconstruction and modernisation of the state. The Modern Village in Franco’s Spain studies the reconstruction of the towns devastated between 1936 and 1939. It analyses the ideological, political, and urbanistic principles of Franco’s hydro-social programme of modernisation of the countryside through the creation of man-made landscapes (Kulturlandschaften) of dams, irrigation canals, electric power plants, and new settlements – a genuine experiment in water urbanism. The consequent strategy of interior colonisation entailed the construction of 300 new villages or pueblos, each designed as a ‘rural utopia’ centred on a plaza mayor, which embodied, between tradition and modernity, the political ideal of civil life under the national-catholic regime. In the 1950s – 1960s, a new generation of architects, including José Luis Fernández del Amo, Alejandro de la Sota, and Antonio Fernández Alba, reimagined the pueblos as platforms of urban and architectonic experimentation in their search for an abstracted rural vernacular and an organic urban form merging with the landscape.

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These essays, from leading names in the field, weave together the parallels and differences between the past and present of civic art. Offering prospects for the first decades of the twenty-first century, the authors open up a broad international dialogue on civic art, which relates historical practice to the contemporary meaning of civic art and its application to community building within today’s multi-cultural modern cities.The volume brings together the rich perspectives on the thought, practice and influence of leading figures from the great era of civic art that began in the nineteenth century and blossomed in the early twentieth century as documented in the works of Werner Hegemann and his contemporaries and considered fundamental to contemporary practice.

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