Taubman College Assistant Professor Claire Zimmerman’s co-edited essay collection, Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond, appeared as Volume 21 in the Yale Studies in British Art (Yale University Press) in November.
The book, edited by Mark Crinson, art history professor, University of Manchester, UK, and Zimmerman, art history and architecture assistant professor, at University of Michigan, addresses how the neo-avant-garde and postmodern movements have long been understood in terms of their re-working of modernism and a narrative emphasizing rupture and new beginnings. Compelling continuities between the two, especially in postwar Britain, suggest that a new account is needed. This collection of provocative essays discusses the work of architects and their associates, including Alice and Peter Smithson, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, James Stirling, James Gowan, Eduardo Paolozzi, Leon Krier, Allan Greenberg, Reyner Banham and Charles Jencks, and explores why the debate over postwar modernism was especially vocal in Britain.
Essays examine such topics as Brutalism, pop architecture, 1950s London, the legacy of Mies van der Rohe, housing, civic architecture, Italian neo-realism and changing alignments in theory and philosophy of the period. The essays focus on Britain, while looking beyond to Brazil, New Zealand and the U.S., expanding the discussion to include new kinds of internationalization that developed rapidly in the postwar period and set the stage for architectural developments today.
The book is available for purchase by Yale University Press, Amazon.com, and other outlets.
