Kasper Nielsen

Work/Research

When the modern movement in architecture took off at the beginning of the 20th century, one of the inherited historical values explicitly rejected from the new modernist curriculum was monumentality, and one of the more famous rejections was Lewis Mumford's 1938 axiom: "if it is a monument it is not modern, and if it is modern it cannot be a monument."
For most of the time, monumentality thus remained an undesired ‘stowaway' on the vessel of modernism. Occasionally, this hidden passenger managed to capture the spotlight for brief periods of time, and my research focuses on two such moments in time, the 1940s and the 1970s, when monumentality became an inspirational force in architectural theory, and, although to a more limited extent, also an influence on architectural practice. Both debates unfolded in transatlantic academic networks but had different backgrounds and consequences. A significant ambition for many participants in both debates, however, was to change the trajectory of International Style modernism, and to replace purist or naïve functionalist understandings of modernism with more inclusive definitions.
The monumentality debates were preceded by manifestoes authored by Sigfried Giedion, José Luis Sert, and Fernand Léger, and just like the architectural manifesto, monumentality seems to have vanished from the radar in today's architectural discourse. In my dissertation work, which is a historiography of the monumental in modern movement history writing, this absence prompts an inquiry into why, how, and when monumentality lost its pertinence.
Other research interests include: Aesthetics, art history, the role of systems theory/biological theories in architecture theory, philosophy of science