Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics After Modernism

Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics After Modernism by Scott, Felicity D.. Hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780262195621.

Shortlisted for the 2008 RIBA Sir Nikolaus Pevsner International Book Award for Architecture. In Architecture or Techno-Utopia, Felicity Scott traces an alternative genealogy of the postmodern turn in American architecture, focusing on a set of experimental practices and polemics that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Scott examines projects, conceptual work, exhibitions, publications, pedagogical initiatives, and agitprop performances that had as their premise the belief that architecture could be ethically and politically relevant. Although most of these strategies were far from the mainstream of American architectural practice, Scott suggests that their ambition€”the demonstration of architectures ongoing potential for social and political engagement€”was nonetheless remarkable. Scott examines both the marginal and the prominent: the Marxist architectural criticism of Meyer Schapiro; the curatorial work of Arthur Drexler at