Overview

Political Postmodernisms shows how sites outside of Western Europe and North America undermine an established narrative of architecture theory and history. It focuses specifically on postmodern architecture, which is traditionally understood as embodying the flippant and apolitical aesthetics of capitalist affluence. By investigating postmodern architecture’s manifestations in the unlikely settings of Chile during the neoliberal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and Poland during the late socialist Polish People’s Republic, the book argues for a new account that incorporates the political roles it plays when seen in a global perspective. Political Postmodernisms has three goals. First, it challenges the familiar narrative regarding postmodern architecture as following the “cultural logic of late capitalism” (Fredric Jameson) or as a socially conservative project (Jürgen Habermas). Second, it fills in portions of Chilean and Polish architectural history that have been neglected by Chilean and Polish architectural historians themselves. Third, Political Postmodernisms shows how architecture can work as a political form – serving propagandistic purposes and functioning as part of oppositional projects. The book is projected to be of use to students and scholars in global modern and contemporary architecture history, history of urban planning, East European Studies, and Latin American Studies.

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9781032016573

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Lidia Klein is an Assistant Professor in Architectural History at the School of Architecture, University of North Carolina – Charlotte, specializing in global contemporary architecture. She earned her first Ph.D. from the University of Warsaw in Poland in 2013 and her second from Duke University in 2018. Prior to joining UNCC in 2018, Klein was awarded a Fulbright Junior Advanced Research Grant to the AAHVS Department at Duke (2010–2011) and was a Visiting Assistant in Research at the Yale School of Architecture (2016). Her book projects include the single-author study Living Architectures: Biological Analogies in Architecture of the End of the 20th Century (Warsaw: Fundacja Kultury Miejsca, 2014, in Polish) and the edited books Transformation: Polish Art, Design and Architecture after 1989 (Warsaw: Fundacja Kultury Miejsca, 2017, in Polish) and Polish Postmodernism: Architecture and Urbanism (Warsaw: 40000 Malarzy, 2013, in Polish).

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