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Title Laughing at architecture : architectural histories of humour, satire and wit / edited by Michela Rosso
Published London ; New York, NY : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019
©2019

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Description 1 online resource (xvi, 272 pages)
Contents Humour : a lens for the architectural and urban historian / Michela Rosso -- Laughing at the baroque : a drawing and some texts compared / Susanna Pasquali -- From reportage to ridicule : satirizing the building industry in the eighteenth-century Irish press / Conor Lucey -- The thorn of scorn : John Nash and his All Souls Church for a transformed regency London / Daniela Roberts -- 'A joke that has gone on far too long' : mocking the completion of the New Hôtel des Postes de Paris (1886-1888) / Guy Lambert -- Deconstructing Gaudí : entangled relationships between satire and architectural criticism / Josep-Maria Garcia-Fuentes -- Confronting problems with a sense of humour : Adolf Loos's architectural polemics and Viennese journalism / Ruth Hanisch -- Words and images of contempt : Il Selvaggio on Architecture (1926-1942) / Michela Rosso -- Osbert Lancaster : architectural humour in the time of functionalism / Alan Powers -- Irrational interiors : the modern domestic landscape seen in caricatures / Gabriele Neri -- From 'Little Russia' to 'Planet of the Apes' : nicknaming twentieth-century mass housing in Belgium / Evert Vandeweghe -- Saul Steinberg's 'graph paper architecture' : humorous drawings and diagrams as instruments of critique / Christoph Lueder -- The modern city through the mirror of humour : a different portrait / Olivier Ratouis -- Splendid?! Preposterous! Chinese artists mock the architectural spectacle / Angela Becher
Summary In a media-saturated world, humour stands out as a form of social communication that is especially effective in re-appropriating and questioning architectural and urban culture. Whether illuminating the ambivalences of metropolitan life or exposing the shock of modernisation, cartoons, caricature, and parody have long been potent agents of architectural criticism, protest and opposition. In a novel contribution to the field of architectural history, this book outlines a survey of visual and textual humour as applied to architecture, its artefacts and leading professionals. Employing a wide variety of visual and literary sources (prints, the illustrated press, advertisements, theatrical representations, cinema and TV), thirteen essays explore an array of historical subjects concerning the critical reception of projects, buildings and cities through the means of caricature and parody. Subjects range from 1750 to the present, and from Europe and the USA to contemporary China. From William Hogarth and George Cruikshank to Osbert Lancaster, Adolf Loos' satire, and Saul Steinberg's celebrated cartoons of New York City, graphic and descriptive humour is shown to be an enormously fruitful, yet largely unexplored terrain of investigation for the architectural and urban historian
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on November 26, 2018)
Subject Architecture -- Humor
Architecture -- Caricatures and cartoons
Architecture.
Cultural studies.
Theory of architecture.
Humour.
History of architecture.
ARCHITECTURE -- Adaptive Reuse & Renovation.
ARCHITECTURE -- Buildings -- Landmarks & Monuments.
ARCHITECTURE -- Professional Practice.
ARCHITECTURE -- Reference.
Architecture
Genre/Form Caricatures and cartoons
Humor
Form Electronic book
Author Rosso, Michela, editor.
ISBN 9781350022768
1350022764
9781350022751
1350022756