Papers by Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth Century Architecture Reimagined the Past, 2023
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"Beware Architecture!" Architecture that entails surprise, even danger, is the subject ... more "Beware Architecture!" Architecture that entails surprise, even danger, is the subject of this exciting discourse on a body of work that has gained increasing international attention since the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Graz and Vienna came to represent the radical edge of European architecture. Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen looks at how this architecture tests the limits of the modern tradition, bringing to light work that is little known yet extremely consequential for contemporary theoretical discourse.Forged in a rarified architectural climate dominated by postwar Marxist-Freudian trends, the Austrian avant-garde challenges the traditional paradigms of objecthood, compositional form, programmic functionality, and spatial closure, emphasizing the fictional and the fantastic embodied in the more peripheral notions within the modern tradition: glass, ornament, machine mysticism, and the organic gestural line.Pelkonen moves between a solid analysis of individual works of architects and firms such as Volker Giencke, Gunter Domenig, Klaus Kada, Helmut Richter, COOP Himmelblau, and Haus-Rucker-Co, and others, and their historical and cultural contexts: philosophical debates on Heidegger, Bloch, Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, and Giorgio Agamben; and the postwar debate on the avant-garde through the works of Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Francis Bacon, and the Wiener Aktionisten.
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Conference co-organized by the Institute of Fine Arts; Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal... more Conference co-organized by the Institute of Fine Arts; Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; and Princeton University's School of Architecture.
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Mediated Messages
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A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1925-1950
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Getty Research Journal, 2017
The article discusses the emergence of morphology within the field of architectural theory and pr... more The article discusses the emergence of morphology within the field of architectural theory and practice during the late 1950s and early 1960s. The shared goal with all those evoking the term was to make architecture regain a depth of meanings and associations lost to economic and functionalist imperative. The essay focuses on issues of one of the most famous “little” magazines, Le carré bleu, devoted to the topic “morphology-urbanism” edited by the Finnish Team Ten member Reima Pietilä (1923–93) around 1960. Particular attention is paid to series of urban studies which read in multiple registers and scales; a single drawing could be, for example, simultaneously be read as an abstract composition as well as a urban plan, by recalling both a suprematist painting and a topographical maps.
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Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 2013
Felix Candela 1910–2010 Institut Valencia d’Art Modern, Valencia, Spain 21 October 2010–2 January... more Felix Candela 1910–2010 Institut Valencia d’Art Modern, Valencia, Spain 21 October 2010–2 January 2011 Museo Extremeno e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporaneo, Badajoz, Spain 17 March–14 August 2011 Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City 22 September 2011–15 January 2012 Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University 11 February–31 March 2012 The exhibition of the work of the Spanish-Mexican architect-engineer Felix Candela, known for his thin-shell concrete structures, resonates with global contemporary architecture culture. For example, Candela’s parabolic forms bear a family resemblance to the work of a fellow Spaniard, Santiago Calatrava. As is the case with Calatrava’s work, images of Candela’s structures were widely circulated in the architectural press at the time. This exhibition reveals that there were, in fact, many differences. While today’s spectacular forms result from sophisticated computer modeling and fabrication, Candela’s thin-concrete shells were often based on on-site experimentation and crude construction methods. Although Candela enjoyed an international career and even stardom, his career is deeply rooted in the culture of his adopted homeland of Mexico of the 1950s. Organized and circulated by Accion Cultural Espanola with the collaboration of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), the exhibition Felix Candela 1910–2010 was originally presented in 2010 at the Institut Valencia d’Art Modern on the occasion of the centenary celebrations of Candela’s birth. From there it traveled to the Museo Extremeno e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporaneo in Badajoz, Spain, the Museo de Arte Moderno of Mexico City, and finally to the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University in spring 2012, thus following the route taken by of one of the greatest architect-engineers of the twentieth century from his native Spain to Mexico and subsequently to the United States. In a similar reflection on Candela’s international life and career, Juan Ignacio del Cueto Ruiz-Funes, the professor at UNAM who curated the show, drew on archival resources on two continents. The exhibition included work drawn from the collections of the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University, the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University, and the Archives of Mexican Architects …
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Joellho , 2022
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Cultural History of the Avant-garde in the Nordic Countries, 2019
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Alvar Aalto Beyond Finland, 2018
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The plan was eventually to create a network of educational centers around the country that would ... more The plan was eventually to create a network of educational centers around the country that would help revive American education as well as industry. In a lecture given at Princeton University's Department of Art and Archaeology in 1930, and published the following year in Modern Architecture: Being the Kahn Lectures for 1930, Wright talked about " experiment centers " or " style stations, " each with about 100 students, spread around the country. They were a key component of the educational program in Broadacre City, his decentralized settlement pattern based on agrarian ideals, which he began to work on around the same time. In his 1932 book The Disappearing City, Wright described how these " style stations or culture centers could be alcoves in connection with standard college courses in the history of art, architecture and archaeology. " " These units, " he concluded, would be " directly dedicated to practical style culture, would be essential to the organized growth of the organic Broadacre City. " The first concrete proposal was to establish a school on the site of the Hillside Home School previously run by his two aunts in his native Wisconsin, called the Hillside Home School of the Allied Arts. A proposal sent out to prospective students and donors reveals an even more ambitious goal behind the project: to rescue humanity compromised by traditional education and its institutions: We believe the time has come when Art should take the lead in Education, because we believe creative faculty is the birthright of Man—the quality in him that has enabled him to distinguish himself from the brute. […] The emphasis on intellect has betrayed this inner core of humanity. "
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The paper discusses the early Helsinki years of the magazine Le Carré Bleu (1958-1961) and its ed... more The paper discusses the early Helsinki years of the magazine Le Carré Bleu (1958-1961) and its editorial focus on the study of form, particularly architect Reima Pietilä's interest in morphology.
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Papers by Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
As the title of the book suggests, the ambition to exhibit architecture entails always a paradox: how to exhibit something as large and complex as a building or a city, and how to communicate something as elusive as an architectural experience that unfolds in space and time? To be sure, architecture poses a challenge to exhibition as a medium; indeed, what do we exactly exhibit when we exhibit architecture: should we be satisfied to exhibit photographs of buildings and sites, or should be aim to put whole buildings or, if that is not possible, fragments and models of them on display? These were among the questions the organizers posed to a group of architectural and art historians, practicing architects, and curators, who were invited to participate to contribute to the book. Their essays address not only the exhibition as a medium, but challenge the stability of our preconceived idea what architecture is by opening up a whole range of possibilities how architecture is made, experienced and discussed.