Search results for ""Author Kathleen James-Chakraborty""

After World War II, West Germans and West Berliners found ways of communicating both their recent sufferings and aspirations for stable communities through buildings that fused the ruins of historicist structures with new constructions rooted in the modernism of the 1910s and ‘20s. As Modernism as Memory illustrates, these postwar practices undergird the approaches later taken in influential structures created or renovated in Berlin following the fall of the Wall, including the Jewish Museum and the Reichstag, the New Museum and the Topography of Terror.While others have characterized contemporary Berlin’s museums and memorials as postmodern, Kathleen James-Chakraborty argues that these environments are examples of an “architecture of modern memory” that is much older, more complex, and historically contingent. She reveals that churches and museums repaired and designed before 1989 in Düren, Hanover, Munich, Neviges, Pforzheim, Stuttgart, and Weil am Rhein contributed to a modernist precedent for the relationship between German identity and the past developed since then in the Ruhr region and in Berlin. Modernism as Memory demonstrates that how one remembers can be detached from what one remembers, contrasting ruins with recollections of modernism to commemorate German suffering, the Holocaust, and the industrial revolution, as well as new spaces for Islam in the country.

Read more less

Offering the first comprehensive training in the visual arts grounded in abstraction, the Bauhaus was the site of a dazzling range of influential experiments in painting, architecture, photography, industrial design, and even artistic education itself. Three-quarters of a century later, the “look” of the new remains indebted to the Bauhaus and its equation of technology with modernism. Central to discussions of the relationships between art, industrialization, and politics in the twentieth century, much of the school’s later impact was derived in part from its status as one of the foremost cultural symbols of Germany’s first democracy and its public reputation as a “cathedral of socialism.” In this book, editor Kathleen James-Chakraborty and seven other scholars analyze the accomplishments and dispel the myths of the Bauhaus, placing it firmly in a historical context from before the formation of the Weimar Republic through Nazi ascendancy and World War II into the cold war. Together, they investigate its professors’ and students’ interactions with mass culture; establish the complexity of its relationship with Wilhelmine, Nazi, and postwar German politics; and challenge the claim that its architects greatly influenced American architecture in the 1930s. Their most explosive conclusions address the degree to which some aspects of Bauhaus design continued to flourish during the Third Reich before becoming one of the cold war’s most enduring emblems of artistic freedom. In doing so, Bauhaus Culture calls into question the degree to which this influential school should continue to symbolize an uncomplicated relationship between art, modern technology, and progressive politics. Contributors: Greg Castillo, Juliet Koss, Rose-Carol Washton Long, John V. Maciuika, Wallis Miller, Winifried Nerdinger, Frederic J. Schwartz. Kathleen James-Chakraborty is associate professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of German Architecture for a Mass Audience and Erich Mendelsohn and the Architecture of German Modernism.

Read more less

After World War II, West Germans and West Berliners found ways of communicating both their recent sufferings and aspirations for stable communities through buildings that fused the ruins of historicist structures with new constructions rooted in the modernism of the 1910s and ‘20s. As Modernism as Memory illustrates, these postwar practices undergird the approaches later taken in influential structures created or renovated in Berlin following the fall of the Wall, including the Jewish Museum and the Reichstag, the New Museum and the Topography of Terror.While others have characterized contemporary Berlin’s museums and memorials as postmodern, Kathleen James-Chakraborty argues that these environments are examples of an “architecture of modern memory” that is much older, more complex, and historically contingent. She reveals that churches and museums repaired and designed before 1989 in Düren, Hanover, Munich, Neviges, Pforzheim, Stuttgart, and Weil am Rhein contributed to a modernist precedent for the relationship between German identity and the past developed since then in the Ruhr region and in Berlin. Modernism as Memory demonstrates that how one remembers can be detached from what one remembers, contrasting ruins with recollections of modernism to commemorate German suffering, the Holocaust, and the industrial revolution, as well as new spaces for Islam in the country.

Read more less

Bringing together an international team of scholars, this book offers new perspectives on the impact that the Bauhaus and its teaching had on a wide range of artistic practices. Three of the fields in which the Bauhaus generated immediately transformative effects were housing, typography, and photography. Contributors go further to chart the surprising relation of the school to contemporary developments in hairstyling and shop window display in unprecedented detail. New scholarship has detailed the degree to which Bauhaus faculty and students set off around the world, but it has seldom paid attention to its impact in communist East Germany or in countries like Ireland where no Bauhäusler settled. This wide-ranging collection makes clear that a century after its founding, many new stories remain to be told about the influence of the twentieth century’s most innovative arts institution. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, design history, photography, and architectural history.

Read more less