Synopses & Reviews
Drawing both on the work of modern theorists like Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Siegfried Kracauer and on more recent poststructuralist thought, K. Michael Hays creates an entirely new method of reading architectural production. Challenging much of the traditional wisdom about modernism and the avant-garde, Hays argues that a rigorously articulated "posthumanist" position was actually developed in the modernist architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer. He reinterprets their buildings, projects, and writings as constructions of this new category of subjectivity.
Review
In this original, rigorous, and sophisticated study K. Michael Hays draws on European theory to illuminate the philosophical and epistemological assumptions of the utopian and revolutionary architectural avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s. Hays breaks new ground in identifying the gradual disappearance of the autonomous subject as a central motif of modern architectural history." Anson Rabinbach , The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art The MIT Press
Synopsis
Challenging much of the traditional wisdom about modernism and the avant-garde, Hays argues that a rigorously articulated 'post humanist' position was actually developed in the modernist architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer. He reinterprets their building, projects, and writings as constructions of the new category of subjectivity.
Synopsis
Drawing on both the work of modern theorists like Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Siegfried Kracauer, and more recent poststructuralist thought, K. Michael Hays creates an entirely new method of reading architectural production.
About the Author
K. Michael Hays is Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. In 2000 he was appointed the first Adjunct Curator at the Whitney Museum for American Art. He is the author, among other books, of Modern Architecture and the Posthumanist Subject (1995) and the editor of Architecture Theory since 1968 (2000), both published by the MIT Press.