Publication
Title
Transatlantic crossings : new forms of meaning in the city of the 1970s
Author
Abstract
This micro-narrative explores transatlantic meetings of influential European and American figures at Cornell University in the 1970s. It focuses on Colin Rowe, Oswald Ungers, and Rem Koolhaas, respectively authors of the widely known books Collage City (1978), The City within the City (1977), and Delirious New York (1978). The article argues that their time in the USA led them to produce a body of urban thought that may be seen as a tipping point in design, both for European cities and the USA urban landscape. The twentieth-century discourse on the city is markedly transnational and has often sought a neutral logic for configuring the built environment, yet it also bears the marks of the places in which it was conceived. The disillusionment with the universalizing and technocratic discourse of modernism was already tangible throughout the European debates on the city at the time. The Cornell period incited these three figures to abandon a societally engaged approach to the city in architecture in order to develop a body of work that reclaimed architecture and urban space as domains of cultural meaning. From a background of the social agendas of Europe and confronted with the unselfconscious American environment, Rowe, Ungers, and Koolhaas developed a specifically architectural perspective on planning and urban ideas.
Language
English
Source (journal)
Planning perspectives : an international journal of history, planning and the environment. - London
Publication
London : 2016
ISSN
0266-5433
DOI
10.1080/02665433.2015.1096821
Volume/pages
31 :1 (2016) , p. 103-113
ISI
000366983900001
Full text (Publisher's DOI)
Full text (publisher's version - intranet only)
UAntwerpen
Faculty/Department
Research group
Project info
From sociobiology to urban metabolism: landscape design, ecology and engineering in Belgium (1900-2016).
Publication type
Subject
Art 
Affiliation
Publications with a UAntwerp address
External links
Web of Science
Record
Identifier
Creation 16.02.2016
Last edited 09.10.2023
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