Ulrich Conrads (ed.): Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture (1964/1970)

“The present volume offers eloquent testimony that many of the master builders of this century have held passionate convictions regarding the philosophic and social basis of their art. Nearly every important development in the modern architectural movement began with the proclamation of these convictions in the form of a program or manifesto. The most influential of these are collected here in chronological order from 1903 to 1963. Taken together, they constitute a subjective history of modern architecture; compared with one another, their great diversity of style reveals in many cases the basic differences of attitude and temperament that produced a corresponding divergence in architectural style.

In point of view, the book covers the aesthetic spectrum from right to left; from programs that rigidly generate designs down to the smallest detail to revolutionary manifestoes that call for anarchy in building form and town plan. The documents, placed in context by the editor, are also international in their range: among them are the seminal and prophetic statements of Henry van de Velde, Adolf Loos, and Bruno Taut from the early years of the century; Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1910 annunciation of Organic Architecture; Gropius’s original program for the Bauhaus, founded in Weimar in 1919; “Towards a New Architecture, Guiding Principles” by Le Corbusier; the formulation by Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner of the basic principles of Constructivism; and articles by R. Buckminster Fuller on universal architecture and the architect as world planner. Other pronouncements, some in flamboyant style, including those of Erich Mendelsohn, Hannes Meyer, Theo van Doesburg, Oskar Schlemmer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, El Lissitzky, and Louis I. Kahn. There are also a number of collective or group statements, issued in the name of movements such as CIAM, De Stijl, ABC, the Situationists, and GEAM.

Since the dramatic effectiveness of the manifesto form is usually heightened by brevity and conciseness, it has been possible to reproduce most of the documents in their entirety; only a few have been excerpted.”

First published as Programme und Manifeste zur Architektur des 20. Jahrhunderts by Verlag Ullstein, Frankfurt/M and Berlin, 1964.

Translated by Michael Bullock
Publisher MIT Press, 1970
ISBN 0262530309, 9780262530309
192 pages
via carlao126

PDF (4 MB)

See also Charles Jencks, Karl Kropf (eds.), Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture, 1997.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Critical Essays (1982)

Among the twelve scintillating essays by a German poet, translator, critic and playwright presented here are “The Industrialization of the Mind”, “Poetry and Politics”, “Constituents of a Theory of the Media”, “Toward a Theory of Treason”, “Tourists of the Revolution”, “A Critique of Political Ecology” and “Two Notes on the End of the World”.

Edited by Reinhold Grimm, Bruce Armstrong
Translated by Michael Roloff, Stuart Hood, Judith Ryan, David Fernbach and Hans Magnus Enzensberger
Foreword by John Simon
Introduction by Reinhold Grimm
Publisher Continuum, New York, 1982
German Library series
ISBN 0826402585, 9780826402585
250 pages

Review (Heinz D. Osterle, The German Quarterly, 1986, in German)
Review (Kathy Acker, Artforum, 1983, very low resolution)

Publisher

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Douglas Kahn: Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (2013)

“Earth Sound Earth Signal is a study of energies in aesthetics and the arts, from the birth of modern communications in the nineteenth century to the global transmissions of the present day. Douglas Kahn begins by evoking the Aeolian sphere music that Henry David Thoreau heard blowing along telegraph lines and the Aelectrosonic sounds of natural radio that Thomas Watson heard through the first telephone; he then traces the histories of science, media, music, and the arts to the 1960s and beyond. Earth Sound Earth Signal rethinks energy at a global scale, from brainwaves to outer space, through detailed discussions of musicians, artists and scientists such as Alvin Lucier, Edmond Dewan, Pauline Oliveros, John Cage, James Turrell, Robert Barry, Joyce Hinterding, and many others.”

Publisher University of California Press, 2013
ISBN 0520956834, 9780520956834
343 pages

Reviews: Alessandro Ludovico (Neural, 2013), Christopher Haworth (Organised Sound, 2015), Adam Trainer (Continuum, 2015).

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PDF (removed on 2014-3-19 upon request of the publisher)