Modern Architectural Theory: A Historical Survey, 1673–1968

Modern Architectural Theory is the first book to provide a comprehensive survey of architectural theorem, primarily in Europe and the United States, during three centuries of development. In this synthetic overview, Harry Mallgrave contextualizes architectural discourse within its social and political atmosphere. He explores the philosophical and conceptual evolution of its ideas, the relation of theory to the practice of building, and most importantly, the words of the architects themselves as they contentiously shaped their particular niche of Western civilization. He also examines the compelling currents of French rationalist and British empirical thought, the radical reformation of theory during the Enlightenment, the intellectual ambition and historicist debates of the nineteenth century, and the distinctive varieties of modern theory in the twentieth century up to the profound social upheaval of the 1960s. Modern Architectural Theory challenges many assumptions about architectural modernism and uncovers many new dimensions of the debates about modernism.