Whatever 'ugliness' is, it remains a problematic category in architectural aesthetics - alternately vilified and appropriated, either to shock or to invert conventions of architecture.
This book presents eighteen new essays which rethink ugliness in architecture - from brutalism to eclectic postmodern architectural productions - and together offer a diverse reappraisal of the history and theory of postmodern architecture and design. The essays address both broad theoretical questions on ugliness and postmodern aesthetics, as well as more specific analyses of significant architectural examples dating from the last decades of the twentieth century, addressing the relation between the aesthetic register of ugliness and aesthetic concepts such as brutalism, kitsch, the formless, ad hoc-ism, the monstrous, or the grotesque.
Architecture and Ugliness not only documents the history of a postmodern anti-aesthetic through a diverse set of case studies, it also sheds valuable light on an aesthetic problem which has been largely overlooked in architectural discourse. It is essential reading for all students and scholars with an interest in postmodern architectural history, architectural theory and aesthetics.
List of Figures List of Contributors Retracing the Ugly and the Anti-aesthetic as a Productive Force in Postmodern Architecture Wouter Van Acker, (Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium) 1. Ugliness, the anti-aesthetic and appropriation: with some remarks on the architecture of ARM John Macarthur, (University of Queensland, Australia) 2. On Ugliness (in Architecture) Bart Verschaffel, (Ghent University, Belgium) PART 1: UGLY AND MONSTROUS 3. Instrumentalizing Ugliness: Parallels between High Victorian and Brutalist Architecture Timothy M. Rohan, (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA) 4. Monstrous Becomings: A Minor Cartography Heidi Sohn, (TU Delft, the Netherlands) 5. Faux Monumentality in Ricardo Bofill’s Les espaces d'Abraxas Thomas Mical,(Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand) 6. Post-communism and the Monstrous: Skopje 2014 and Other Political Tales Mirjana Lozanovska, (Deakin University, Australia) 7. Here be Monsters Andrew Leach, (The University of Sydney, Australia) 8. To Make Monsters Caroline O’Donnell, (Cornell University, USA) PART 2: UGLY AND ORDINARY 9. ‘Ugly’: The Architecture of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown Deborah Fausch 10. Camp Ugliness: The Case of Charles W. Moore Patricia A. Morton, (University of California, Riverside, USA) 11. Architecture in El Alto: the Politics of Excess Elisabetta Andreoli 12. The Critical Kitsch of Alchimia and Memphis: Design by Media AnnMarie Brennan, (University of Melbourne, Australia) 13. The Immediacy of Urban Reality in Postwar Italy: Between Neorealism’s and Tendenza’s Instrumentalization of Ugliness Marianna Charitonidou, (National Technical University of Athens, Greece) 14. Ugliness as Aesthetic Friction: Renewing Architecture Against the Grain Lara Schrijver, (University of Antwerp, Belgium) 15. Ugliness, or the Cathectic Moment of Modulation between Terror and the Comic in Postmodern Architecture Wouter Van Acker, (Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium) Index
Wouter Van Acker is chargé de cours (Associate Professor) and Chair of Architectural Theory at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium. Thomas Mical is Professor of Architectural Theory and Head of the School of Art and Design of Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. He is the author of Surrealism and Architecture (2004).
Reviews for Architecture and Ugliness: Anti-Aesthetics and the Ugly in Postmodern Architecture
A wonderfully rich and stimulating collection of essays, which plumbs the fraught nooks and crannies of the ugly’s discursive terrain. Taken together, the detailed case studies build a satisfyingly variegated account of the complex play of fascination and repulsion that attends aberrant form and architecture’s negotiations with it since the mid-twentieth century. * Mark Dorrian, Forbes Chair in Architecture, University of Edinburgh, UK *
