architecture
In 1946, the arts and culture journal Marg was founded under the editorial leadership of writer, arts patron, and cultural critic Mulk Raj Anand (1905–2004). Dedicated to the promotion and analysis of the arts, Marg featured modernist practices and heritage forms from around the world and from a diverse range of periods in illustrative displays, scholarly essays, and editorial content. Multiple discourses were brought into conversation with each other through a type of visual pedagogy. From architectural modernism to art history to practices in picture framing, it interpreted and taught a new modernist historical arc of arts in a decolonizing India.
What architectural and spatial shape should a socialist society take? This was a question of heated debate in post-revolutionary Russia, all the more so in the late 1920s and early 1930s, once the survival of the Bolshevik state seemed assured and the focus could turn to constructing its infrastructures. This essay examines one short-lived but significant episode in the history of Soviet architecture and urban planning: the disurbanist philosophy of “new resettlement,” formulated in 1929 by the sociologist Mikhail Okhitovich (1896–1937), as a fundamentally Marxist program.
How might we situate Paul Scheerbart within German modernism? The work of excavating his oeuvre, its conceptual and generic contours, and its entanglements with other figures and constellations of German modernism has begun in earnest, yet he is still known primarily as a theorist of glass architecture, on the one hand, and as a decades-long, subterranean influence on Walter Benjamin, on the other—Benjamin received a copy of Scheerbart’s 1913 novel Lesabéndio from Gershom Scholem as a wedding present, and continually returned to the utopian aspects of Scheerbart’s writing.
In the near-century since the publication of The Bridge (1930), Hart Crane has been widely recognized as the poet of urban modernity, or, in his own words, as a “suitable Pindar for the dawn of the machine age." He has been acclaimed as celebrant and critic, by turn, of America’s myth of itself and as a pioneer cartographer of the queer spaces of the modern metropolis. Paradoxically, perhaps, it is his rendering of the late nineteenth-century Brooklyn Bridge (designed by John Roebling, started in 1869 and opened in 1883), which has been taken as central to his vision of early twentieth-century America’s tensile complexity.
“The task of a museum,” wrote Italian critic and curator Pietro Maria Bardi in 1951, “should be to make resound, to interpret with perspicacity and appropriate technique, those monuments that sing: thus will be avoided the risk of useless sentimentalities, dangerous neutralities, hybrid educations, and eclecticism.”