Illustration from Bernard Rudofsky, Are Clothes Modern? An Essay on Contemporary Apparel, 1947.
Illustration from Bernard Rudofsky, Are Clothes Modern? An Essay on Contemporary Apparel, 1947.
Kent Hall, Room 120
1020 E 58th St
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In her work, Beatriz Colomina considers concepts of space through lenses of architecture, image, the body and gender. Here she presents a talk titled, “The Perversions of Modern Architecture: Everything you wanted to know about it but were afraid to ask.”
Modern architecture was never straightforward. Despite the surface rhetoric of rationality, clarity, and efficiency, modern designers engaged with everything that escapes rationality: sexuality, violence, exoteric philosophies, occultism, disease, the psyche, pharmacology, extraterrestrial life, chance, the primitive, the animal, the fetish, etc. Through a series of case studies from the early 20th century till today, of both mainstream figures and misfits, Colomina explores the backwater of modern architecture to reveal the astonishing richness and eccentricity of the field.
Beatriz Colomina is an internationally renowned architectural historian and theorist who has written extensively on questions of architecture and media. Her books include Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994) and Sexuality and Space (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), both of which were awarded the prestigious International Book Award by the American Institute of Architects.
