Whatever ‘ugliness’ is, it remains a problematic category in architectural aesthetics – alternately vilified and appropriated, used either to shock or to invert conventions of architecture.
This book presents sixteen new scholarly essays which rethink ugliness in recent 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. The book attends to the diverse relations between the aesthetic register of ugliness and closely connected aesthetic concepts such as the monstrous, the ordinary, disgust, the excessive, the grotesque, the interesting, the impure and the sublime.
This volume does not simply document the history of a postmodern anti-aesthetic through case studies. Instead, it aims to shed light on aesthetic problems that have been largely overlooked in the agenda of architectural theory. This book answers in detail the questions: How did postmodern architects appropriate troublesome contradictions bound to the raw ugliness of the real? How have the ugly and the antiaesthetic been a productive force in postmodern architecture? How can ugliness be of value to architecture? And how can architecture make good use of ugliness?
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 Associate Professor in Architectural Theory and History at the Université libre de Bruxelles, 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 * Mak[es] clearer the development of and deployment of ugliness in architecture and elucidates just how murky and rich the concept can be ... A worthwhile and very rewarding read. * Fabrications *
