Third World Modernism

Architecture, Development and Identity

Duanfang Lu, Duanfang Lu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136895470
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This set of essays brings together studies that challenge interpretations of the development of modernist architecture in Third World countries during the Cold War. The topics look at modernism's part in the transnational development of building technologies and the construction of national and cultural identity. Architectural modernism is far more than another instance of Western expansionist aspirations; it has been developed in cross-cultural spaces and variously localized into nation-building programs and social welfare projects.

The first volume to address countries right across the developing world, this book has a key place in the historiography of modern architecture, dealing with non-Western traditions.

Chapter 1
Introduction: architecture, modernity and identity in the Third World

Duanfang Lu

This book examines modernity’s multiplicity by documenting cutting edge research on architectural modernism in the developing world during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Originating in interwar Europe, modernist architecture – as a way of building, a knowledge product, a style-of-life consumer item, and above all, a symbol of modernity – has traversed national boundaries throughout the world. Despite the extensive adoption of modernist architecture in developing countries, standard history books focus on its development in the West. Up until the last three decades, academic inquiry into the built environment in developing societies concentrated on traditional forms. With the exception of the work of a very small number of acclaimed non-Western architects such as Hasan Fathy and Charles Correa, little attention was devoted to modern architecture in the Third World, which was considered merely lesser forms of Western modernism. This orientation has been changed as canonical narratives which privilege Western modes of thinking and aesthetics are challenged, and orientalist perspectives on other cultures are debunked. Informed by turbulent theoretical debates throughout the humanities and social sciences, scholarship on the far-reaching variability of modernism has begun to grow, advancing our understanding of how modernist architecture was adopted, modified, interpreted, and contested in different parts of the world.¹ This discourse has focused on national building projects and their confrontation with and assimilation of modernism. Is it possible to transcend binary oppositions such as modern/traditional and core/ periphery while still recognizing the ongoing making of global modernity? Can the history of modernist architecture be more responsive to the realities of other histories? How did architectural modernism develop with reference not only to Western epistemology, but also to the experiences and knowledge of other Third World countries? And how did the implications of modernist architecture continuously shift in the context of conflicting relations involving nationalistic concerns, global aspirations, and the problems of underdevelopment?

Third World Modernism aims to address these issues by connecting debates on modernism that have unfolded in different geographic regions in the mid-twentieth century, a historical period characterized by processes including independence, decolonization, nation building, architectural modernization, and the development of the Cold War. The book problematizes the global spread of modernist architecture against this broad socio-political context and highlights what is at stake in the study of the intertwined relationship between architecture, modernity, and identity in the developing world.

To think the modern is to think the present, which is necessarily caught in the ever-shifting social, political, and cultural cross-currents. For many decades, modernization was depicted in social sciences as a broad series of processes of industrialization, rationalization, urbanization, and social changes through which modern societies arose. This approach has been heavily criticized for its Eurocentric assumptions in recent years. It assumes, for example, that only Western society is truly modern and that all societies are heading towards the same destination. With the epistemological break triangulated by postmodern, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories, the dominance of progressive historicism and its associated binaries (modern/traditional, self/other, center/periphery, etc.) is being challenged. Questions about modernity, understood as modes of experiencing and questioning the present, are being rethought.

This book is an attempt to contribute unique perspectives to the critical rethinking of the modern by unraveling the complex meanings of “Third World modernism.” The term “Third World” has been an important addition to the political vocabulary of the past century. First coined by the French demogra-pher Alfred Sauvy in 1952, the phrase gradually gained popularity as a classifica-tion describing the emerging arena of global politics associated with neither Western capitalism nor Soviet socialism in the early 1960s.² This arena included the developing nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America which shared broad historical, economic, social, cultural, and ideological commonalities: a history of colonization, relatively low per capita incomes, culturally non-Western, and agri-culturally-based economies.³ The meeting of Afro-Asian nations held in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955 marked a significant step in the institutionalization of the nona-ligned/Third World identity, which was consolidated through subsequent assemblies (in Belgrade in 1961, Cairo in 1964, Lusaka in 1970, Algiers in 1973, Colombo in 1976, Havana in 1979, New Delhi in 1983, and Harare in 1986).⁴ Third World nations were therefore also referred to as “nonaligned nations,” although this was not entirely accurate. For example, despite being part of the Third World, Turkey and Pakistan were not part of the nonaligned membership due to their close ties to Western capitalism via the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) respectively.⁵

Compared with other alternative phrases such as “developing coun-tries,” “less developed countries,” “non-industrialized countries,” and “the South,” the Third World is more than merely a socio-economic designation. It has come to represent a forceful ideology, a meaningful rallying point, a widely shared mentality, and a unique source of identity. The phrase has proven rhetorically, politically, and theoretically effective.⁶ Despite the end of the Cold War, the term “Third World” remains viable in contemporary geopolitical vocabulary, as seen in leading scholarly journals such as Third World Quarterly and Journal of Third World Studies.

This book is concerned with issues related to the development of modernist architecture in developing societies from the end of the Second World War in 1945 to the late 1970s, a period which witnessed the steady growth of Third World solidarity. On the one hand, chapters in this volume demonstrate that there are multiple ways of being modern, which are not the less perfect, incomplete versions of an idealized full-blown modernity, but constituencies with their own trajectories, discourses, social institutions, and categories of reference. On the other hand, these studies show that as a result of social production under similar historical conditions, and representation of similar values and beliefs, modernist architecture in these societies shared some common characteristics and trajectories that were sharply different from those shared by developed soci-eties during the same historical period. This book uses the concept of “Third World modernism” to describe, analyze, and theorize these distinctive meanings, practices, trajectories, transformations, and consequences of modernist architecture in developing countries in the mid-twentieth century. By doing so it aims to overcome the earlier hegemonic assumption which identified the West as the sole yardstick to measure the beginning and end, success and failure of modernism. It shows how canonical architectural historiography has universalized experiences with modernity that were actually peculiar to the Euro-American context.

Until now, most existing volumes have been monographs on the development of modernist architecture within a single nation or anthologies that focus on a single region.⁷ Third World Modernism is the first edited volume that addresses the development of architectural modernism in countries across the Third World. It represents an opportunity to map multiple positions in related debates. The book highlights sites of encounter, connection, and negotiation. Many nation-based histories of modern architecture picture architectural histories as disconnected variations, each confined to an a priori state-defined space and following an internal logic. To quote Eric Wolf, this is a “model of the world as a global pool hall in which entities spin off each other like so many hard and rounded billiard balls.”⁸ In contrast, by mapping the concrete routes to and through modernity, the original scholarship of this volume points to the importance of multiple patterns of interlocking not only between non-Western and Western locales, but also among non-Western ones. Together the essays reveal the intrinsically paradoxical differences at the very heart of the modern, on the one hand, and the geo-historical entanglements of modernities from a global perspective, on the other.

In the following, I will discuss “Third World modernism” from four interconnected perspectives, namely, modernism as globalism, modernism as developmentalism, modernism as nationalism, and modernism as postcolonialism, which both sets up theoretical and historical frameworks for the book and introduces the chapters that follow. I will close the chapter with a discussion of the epistemological implications of this study. A significant implication has been that in order to reach a true dialogism, we need to recognize not only the histories of different modernities, but also the legitimacies of different bodies of architectural knowledge. It is my hope that the notion of “Third World modernism” will eventually come to represent the aspirations for a more sustainable built environment of humanity.

Modernism as globalism

The term “modern” originated from the fifth-century Latin term modemus which was then employed to distinguish the Christian present from the pagan past. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, three vital transitions – the discovery of the Americas, the Renaissance, and the Reformation – formed “the epochal threshold” to modern times in Europe.⁹ While the processes of modernization began around the fifteenth century, the kinds of art, literature, architecture, and music we term “modernism” did not appear until the late nineteenth century. Marshall Berman characterizes modernity as a historical experience that seeks to ceaselessly transform the very conditions that produce it.¹⁰ In the same vein, modernism has been a reaction to societal modernization, which is modern in its celebration of newness and the break from tradition, and anti-modern in its critique of modernization’s betrayal of its own human promise.

In architectural discourse, the very idea of modernism is culturally and historically constructed into a heroic interwar modernism and a revisionist post-Second World War modernism, which are characterized by different manifestations of the modern in architecture. The modern movement in architecture originated from the avant-garde spirit shared by modernist painting, music, and literature. Compared with their literary and artistic counterparts, whose counter-modern gestures called the authority ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Illustration credits and sources
• Chapter 1 Introduction: architecture, modernity and identity in the Third World
• Part I The will of the age
• Part II Building the nation
• Part III Entangled modernities
• Selected Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index