Space Making and Social Meaning

This panel will explore the social role of art and architecture during the years following World War II. For the governments established during this period one of the most pressing tasks was the development of an architectural vocabulary to embody the ideals of these new societies. This desire for deeply symbolic buildings was matched by an increased interest in constructed social space and its affective capabilities. For the individuals investigating these capabilities, including Henri Lefebvre, José Luis Sert and Fernand Lèger, and the members of the Internationale Situationniste, architecture and art offered dynamic means for the production of new social spaces that would actively shape, and be shaped by, the societies that used them. Art and architecture were then defined and employed as operative means by which the “social” could be both constructed and constructive. Papers should address specific examples of the many ways in which the affective properties of constructed space were theorized and applied during the post-war era in order to provoke specific behavior and initiate broad social change.


Panel Presentations:
  • Theorizing Social Space: Aldo van Eyck and the Realm of the “In-between”
    by Dr. A. Pedret, IIT
  • The Ethics and Aesthetics of the Tabula Rasa by L. Allais, MIT
  • The New, the Old, the Modern: Socialist Architecture in Romania, 1960 – 1970 by J. Maxim, MIT
  • The Child at CIAM: The Negotiation of Agency and Control in Postwar Architectural Discourse by R. Kozlovsky, Princeton


Chair: Dr. Annie Pedret, Illinois Institute of Technology - (via .PDF)

 
Conference Schedule
Organizers