Architecture, Crisis and Resuscitation ─ The Reproduction of Post-Fordism in Late-Twentieth-Century Architecture

A synoptic understanding of what has happened to architecture in the recent past, this book offers a readily understandable overview, connecting otherwise apparently unrelated phenomena. It looks at the relationship between architecture, economy, and society in the context of the rise and spread of neoliberalism over the past four decades.

Spanning from 1966 to the first years of the twenty-first century, the book covers a period which saw changes that included the replacement of `society' by `culture' and the freeing of economy from the dictates of politics. It was the period in which Fordism was eclipsed and architectural modernism dissipated. Architecture radically transformed, substituting the alleged dreariness of modernism with spectacle. The book ties all these together, explaining the manner in which the discipline adjusted itself in order to satisfy the demands posed by a changed society.

Rather than attempt to provide a comprehensive history of architecture since the 1960s, this book offers a theoretical framework which explains the transformation of the discipline in the period, forming a good introduction for architectural students to get acquainted with that recent history. The major contributions to the discipline in recent decades are explored, including architecture theory books by figures ranging from Tafuri to Jencks as well as designs by practioners such as Venturi, Eisenman, and Koolhaas - work which has been widely discussed and had an effect on the discipline's transformation.

`What Architecture, Crisis and Resuscitation has to offer is a highly skilled and throughly informed panorama of a series of intellectual meanders that were quite decisive for architectural culture in the late twentieth century. By positioning, historicizing and contextualising a wide array of architects, critics, projects, texts and buildings, this book makes sense of interrelations and connections that show how architectural culture continuously negotiates its societal conditions.' Hilde Heynen, Katholiek Universiteit Leuven

Tahl Kaminer is a researcher and lecturer at the Delft School of Design, TU Delft. He co-edited the volumes Urban Asymmetries (2011), Critical Tools (2011), and Houses in Transformation (2008), and is a founding member of the academic journal Footprint.