Third World Modernism

The first volume to map multiple positions on architectural modernism across the developing world, this book offers an international perspective on the practices and consequences of modernist architecture in the mid-twentieth century. Presenting fresh case studies from Asia, South America, Africa, and the Middle East, experts in this volume challenge canonical architecture historiography which identifies the West as the sole yardstick to measure the beginning and end, success and failure, of modernism. They show that modernism in Third World nations took trajectories radically different from those in developed societies during the same historical period. The intersections between modernist architecture, globalism, developmentalism, nationalism, and post-colonialism are explored. Chapters illustrate modernism's part in the construction of national and cultural identity, and the geo-historical entanglements of nations.

Creating new openings for cross-cultural analysis of modernism, this provocative book has a key place in the historiography of modern architecture in non-Western societies.

Duanfang Lu is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney.