Histories of the immediate present. Inventing Architectural Moder

This book looks at how the different narratives of four historians of architectural modernism - Emil Kaufmann, Colin Rowe, Reyner Banham, and Manfredo Tafuri - advanced specific versions of modernism.Architecture, at least since the beginning of the twentieth century, has suspended historical references in favor of universalized abstraction. In the decades after the Second World War, when architectural historians began to assess the legacy of the avant-gardes in order to construct a coherent narrative of modernism´s development, they were inevitably influenced by contemporary concerns. In Histories of the Immediate Present , Anthony Vidler examines the work of four historians of architectural modernism and the ways in which their histories were constructed as more or less overt programs for the theory and practice of design in a contemporary context.Vidler looks at the historical approaches of Emil Kaufmann, Colin Rowe, Reyner Banham, and Manfredo Tafuri, and the specific versions of modernism advanced by their historical narratives.