Keywords: architecture – modernity – community – reformist modernism –
inter-war – cultural identities

250 word abstracts are due on 31 January 2006. They will be reviewed by
the planning committee of the International Research Community
Cultural Identities, World Views and Architecture at the beginning of
February.

Address for the proposals: modernity.community@arts.kuleuven.be

The history of the avant-garde in architecture and urbanism in the
interwar period has been studied extensively. Less well known are the
strategies, discourses and practices that were developed by other,
more moderate, groups in response to the disrupting experience of
modernity; in particular those who sought to deal with the
contradictions of modern life by appropriating parts of modernity and
by re-negotiating the meaning of ‘community’ in its confrontation
with ‘society’ (Tönnies). In announcing this call, we aim to bring
together a series of papers which will offer new insights into the
relationship between architecture and modernity in the inter-war
decades and, in so doing, initiate a revision of our understandings of
where innovations in space-making took place at this time.

We are interested in those individuals and organisations that engaged
with modernity not in a straightforward and often dogmatic, way, as
did the avant-garde, but rather with a cautious ‘yes, but …’. Such
groups shared with the avant-garde the desire to develop new forms and
spaces but did not follow its thoroughgoing acceptance of all the
requirements and contradictions of modern life (up to the idea
that ‘art would die’). Our subjects are, then, those who pleaded for
a ‘reformist’ approach to modernity, taking advantage of some of its
potentialities (e.g. technology, efficiency, rationality, new forms of
mass media) but accommodating this within an attitude that was not
aimed towards a complete social or political revolution, but rather a
quiet, less disruptive and non-revolutionary transformation of
society.

There are good reasons to assume that in architecture and urbanism,
reformist modernism was in fact the dominant practice in the inter-war
period. Moreover, the ability of its practitioners to deploy the
notion of ‘community’ to bridge different ways of thinking makes it an
interesting starting point to analyse the ideological constructions
which underpinned a wide range of building practices in these years.
In this way community can be, besides an evocative symbol, an
analytical tool. As a complex, polyvalent concept that combines a
material and an imagined dimension, it can serve as a prism to provide
insight in broader processes of cultural positioning. Our concern is
both methodological and historiographical. This international
colloquium will, in four distinct though correlated strands, explore
the different scenarios in which the idea of ‘community’ were deployed
by diverse social and ideological groups to counterbalance the
homogenizing forces of modernity and through which would be forged the
social and political landscape of post-war Europe.

I. Symbolic Forms and Imagined Communities

1. Landmarks

The Bauhaus Manifesto of 1919 appeared with a woodcut by Feininger on
the cover, representing a cathedral as the shining symbol of an
imaginary community of workers, artisans and artists, who would join
their forces to joyfully build a new and bright future through the
collaboration of progressive minds. Although this kind of symbolism
would disappear from later Bauhaus publications, which, in the spirit
of the New Sobriety, used a much more abstract and constructivist
language, its initial importance is quite significant. It means that
in this particular variant of modernism, the symbolic value of a tower
as the centre around which a community organizes itself, was
recognized and validated. It also referred to the mythic ideal of the
medieval Bauhütte, where artisans, Baumeisters, painters and sculptors
laboured as a unified community to build the ultimate building of
splendour, reverence and joy. Such images were probably operational in
other locations and organizations too but these have thus far enjoyed
less attention from scholars. Therefore, we invite abstracts in which
the role of such images in the architectural practices and discourses
of the modernist movement are analyzed.

2. Ideology under construction

In this strand, we wish to explore how ideological groups tried to
make invisible meanings (‘a commonality’) tangible by using texts,
images and spectacles in which architecture and building practices
were given a primary role. The ambition of some ideological groups of
the inter-war period to retrieve a sense of community, is often
labelled with the term nostalgia (nostos - return home, and algia -
longing). Although the adage ‘who we are, depends on who we were’, was
quite dominant in the inter-war period, differentiations have to be
made. The term ‘reflective nostalgia’, can signal a self-aware and
prospective attitude that does not shy away from the contradictions of
modernity. ‘Restorative nostalgia’ on the other hand, is quite the
opposite: it is retrospective and tries to start up a trans-historical
reconstruction of a lost home.

In the inter-war period, those two versions of dealing with anxiety
about a changing world melted together in a specific way: Catholics
and socialists, nationalists and fascists looked at architecture as a
powerful tool for community building. By making a simultaneous
connection with a built reality in the past and future, they tried to
empower their ideological ideas. In political discourses,
philosophical texts, poetry or prose, building metaphors served as a
mode of emplotment. Specific rituals (the laying of the first stone or
the inauguration of important buildings) created a liturgy of
collective harmony. In spectacles, especially mass plays,
architectural elements (eg, temple-like buildings) were incorporated.
All these discourses and practices not only pointed to a rigid past
(fundaments, cornerstones), but also embodied an active future: the
own community became a building project. We therefore call for papers
which address different aspects of this form of ritual.

II. Sites of Emancipation and Re-formation

1. Landscape and Community

In the inter-war period, discussions of the imagination of community
and the representation of landscape were deeply intertwined. In
multiple discourses, the landscape was the preferred canvas on which a
nation’s identity was constructed and defined. Landscape formed,
therefore, a double-edged shuttle between processes of objectification
and subjectification and it enabled a complex exchange between an
understanding of territory as given and a vision of that same
environment as a world to be shaped. The construction of the German
Autobahn network, the emergence of nationwide infrastructure for
vacationing, the search for the natural region and its corresponding
architecture, the promotion of cartographic literacy as a way of
building an experience of nationhood, etc, all present different
dimensions of the way in which landscape was deployed in this double-
edged capacity.

In this strand we wish to explore the extent to which both the
physical and symbolical reproduction of landscapes played a role in
the construction of group-identity, contributing both to the
organization as well as the narration of communities. Should we
understand the conspicuous investment in the language of landscape as
a belated and desperate attempt to narrate into existence a sense of
community which was no longer extant, or rather as an effective
vehicle for the construction of a new sensus communis ?

2. Internal Colonies

In the inter-war period the relation between modernity and community
was perhaps articulated most remarkably in the establishment of
internal colonies across Europe. These social and spatial entities
were symbolically located far from home but were in reality strongly
embedded within the homeland, and became a preferred disciplinary
model for social, hygienist and educational reform.

The vacation colony is the best-known model of such colonies and it
has its origin in the second half of the 19th century in the thoughts
of hygienist thinkers (Leuch, Warrentrap, Cartaz) from Switzerland,
Germany and France. Constructed as opposing poles to industrialising
and growing urban centres, these colonies were designed to 'repair
bodies' and 'restore the souls' and were thought to be harvesting
grounds of free air, openness and health. The colonies however, were
intended to do much more. Organisers often had a distinct social and
political agenda and could originate in rival political and social
philosophies, a desire to separate church and state, from private and
local welfare initiatives, and different viewpoints on child
development and education. Other examples of internal colonies aimed
at social reform are new sites for education (the progressive boarding
schools of inter-war Britain or the village college) and labour
colonies for vagrants (Germany, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland). Such
colonies could also take the form of model environments for urban
living (new housing estates) or new forms of urban social life
(workers’ clubs). This session aims to provide a forum for scholarship
on the historical, ideological, and socio-pedagogical characteristics
of the internal colony. We invite abstracts exploring the ways in
which architects and urban planners across Europe invoked the internal
colony in their work - in written, built, or imagined form.

More information

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