従来は制約が少なくなかった建造物の設計・デザインですが、スティールや強化コンクリートといった新しい資材、空調や照明の新システムは、建築家が自由な発想を持ち、それを実現することにおいて不可欠な変革でした。これによりモダンアートやインダストリアル・デザインとの境界も取り払われ、建築のあり方が刷新されたのです。文化的概念を象徴する建造物の具体例も取り上げながら、近現代史における建築の意義や、影響を及ぼした評論も含めて考察します。
 

• Offers a fresh, clear approach to the story of modern architecture, involving the latest scholarship
• Considers the technical innovations that opened-up the cultural and intellectual opportunities for modern architecture to happen
• Uses examples from around the world to demonstrate how buildings stand for particular architectural ideas
• Explores how buildings can be studied for their insights into the values of the individuals and cultures who produced, designed, and inhabited them

 
Somewhere between 1910 and 1970, architecture changed. Now that modern architecture has become familiar (sometimes celebrated, sometimes vilified), it's hard to imagine how novel it once seemed. Expensive buildings were transformed from ornamental fancies which referred to the classical and medieval pasts into strikingly plain reflections of novel materials, functions, and technologies. Modern architecture promised the transformation of cities from overcrowded conurbations characterised by packed slums and dirty industries to spacious realms of generous housing and clean mechanised production set in parkland. At certain times and in certain cultures, it stood for the liberation of the future from the past.

This Very Short Introduction explores the technical innovations that opened-up the cultural and intellectual opportunities for modern architecture to happen. Adam Sharr shows how the invention of steel and reinforced concrete radically altered possibilities for shaping buildings, transforming what architects were able to imagine, as did new systems for air conditioning and lighting. While architects weren't responsible for these innovations, they were among the first to appreciate how they could make the world look and feel different, in connection with imagery from other spheres like modern art and industrial design. Focusing on a selection of modern buildings that also symbolize bigger cultural ideas, Sharr discusses what modern architecture was like, why it was like that, and how it was imagined. Considering the work of some of the historians and critics who helped to shape modern architecture, he demonstrates how the field owes as much to its storytellers as to its buildings.