Alfred Preis and Viennese Modernism in Hawai‘i

Abstract
Preis, who was a Viennese émigré and refugee architect with no early experience designing for tropical climates, went on to become one of the most prolific mid-century regionalist and modernist Hawai‘i designers. Although he is best known for his award-winning design for the USS Arizona Memorial (1962) - one of the ships infamously sunk in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Pries’s earlier institutional and residential commissions are arguably his most compelling. His Viennese roots directly influenced Pries’s approach to design in Hawai‘i. By engaging numerous precedents from Vienna, he eventually forged a novel idiom for Hawai‘i domestic design. This article will examine the interiors of two of Preis’s more than 100 single-family houses – the Scudder Residence (now the Scudder-Gillmar Residence) (1939-1940) and the Dr. Edward and Elsie Lau Residence (1951) – in order to highlight some of the ways in which Preis transported Viennese modern design ideas of the first three decades of the 20th century some 7,616 miles from Austria into the middle of the Pacific Ocean. His interior designs for these houses evidence strong relationships with the ideas of earlier Viennese modernists about spatial planning, the aesthetic uses of materials, furnishings, and color. Perhaps more than any other influence, Preis’s Vienna experience culminated in modern architecture that was as sensorially pleasurable as Hawai‘i itself.

Keywords
Modern Movement, Modern architecture, Tropical architecture, Modern diaspora, Design with climate, Alfreid Preis, Hawaiian modern architecture.

Issue 63
Year 2020
Pages 48-55
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.52200/63.A.1WCECYVH

PDF (English)
“Our Cinderella North” – The Modern Diaspora’s long reach into Australia’s tropical zones

Abstract
Modernism in tropical in Australia is testimony to the tenacity and optimism of individuals and communities in the vast, “empty north” of the continent, but also reflects a young nation’s strategic and commercial need to develop and make viable this region in the years following WWII. As practitioners, academics and public servants, the Modern Diaspora, introduced and promoted Modernism as a climate responsive solution to building in the tropics. The result is work that is inventive, frequently of modest material means and expressive of its tropical circumstances.

Keywords
Modern Movement, Modern architecture, Tropical architecture, Modern diaspora, Design with climate, Australian modern architecture.

Issue 63
Year 2020
Pages 40-47
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.52200/63.A.9ECAUPWN

PDF (English)
Monuments of Country, Climate and Culture: Michel Écochard and the Design of the Postcolonial Tropolis

Abstract
The French architect and urban designer Écochard, was one of the numerous architects that designed buildings and cities for newly independent nations in the post-war era of decolonization. Many of these young nation states were in search for urban and architectural projects that would explicitate a “proper” model of modernization that differed from that of the former colonizer. This essay argues that the principles of tropical architecture would play a key role in representing and monumentalizing such an alternative model of modernization.

Keywords
Modern Movement, Modern architecture, Tropical architecture, Modern diaspora, Design with climate, Michel Écochard, African modern architecture.

Issue 63
Year 2020
Pages 32-39
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.52200/63.A.JJRX94UU

PDF (English)
Otto Königsberger and Global Architectural Histories

Abstract
Otto Königsberger was a German émigré architect who worked as the state architect in princely Mysore in British India in the 1940s. Upon emigration to London in 1951, he subsequently became an educator of Tropical Architecture (1954-1971) at the AA School of Architecture. This paper examines how Otto Königsberger’s career can illuminate “global” as a paradigm in Modernist historiography.

Keywords
Modern Movement, Modern architecture, Tropical architecture, Modern diaspora, Design with climate, Otto Königsberger, Indian modern architecture.

Issue 63
Year 2020
Pages 26-31
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.52200/63.A.55NZT8G6

PDF (English)
Tropical Building Research: the Angolan Case

Abstract
This paper investigates how the notion of “tropical architecture” was established in Angola by looking at the local development of scientific knowledge on climate during the 20th century. It focuses on the processes that gave rise to a growing understanding of the geography and climate of the country, namely through the creation of local research institutes. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, increasingly more climatic data was collected in the country. This data was later combined with studies in building physics, giving rise to original research developed by the lea. Local institutions, such as the Public Works Department of Angola (DSOPA), disseminated this knowledge, eventually influencing not only the design methods of local architects but also the development of specific products in the construction sector. The lea became a research and education organization of great relevance in Angola during the 1960s and the 1970s, as well as a symbol of modernity and the quest for scientific knowledge.

Keywords
Modern Movement, Modern architecture, Tropical architecture, Modern diaspora, Design with climate, Vasco Vieira da Costa, Angolan modern architecture.

Issue 63
Year 2020
Pages 18-25
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.52200/63.A.MF8WQP70

PDF (English)
Behind the Veils of Modern Tropical Architecture

Abstract
While orthodoxy was consolidating its hold on modern architecture in the 1930s, fresh new ideas from the periphery began to widen and question its limiting vocabulary. This study looks at projects emerging before the end of that decade that paralleled the much publicized work of Le Corbusier and Brazilian innovators in developing ideas for taming the sun in warm climates. The story focuses on a forgotten speech given in Rangoon which enthused about a soon to be forgotten but effective method of solar control and triggered a yearning for architecture widening its scope to engage with attributes of national identity.

Keywords
Modern Movement, Modern architecture, Tropical architecture, Modern diaspora, Design with climate, Colonialism, Myanmar modern architecture.

Issue 63
Year 2020
Pages 6-17
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.52200/63.A.7LQWCQXU

PDF (English)
South of Cancer: Modern Architecture’s Tropical Diasporas

Abstract
Over twenty years ago in the shadows of an architectural conference in the USA several of us from outside the American/European axis left early, finding the mainstream presentations and discussions boring, predictable and stuck in the ruts of well-worn paths. We were aware that in the wider world genuinely new ideas were emerging with rich traditions at play, altogether less constrained by self-conscious architectural production. We were keen to find a name for these new approaches emerging across latitudes below the Tropic of Cancer and settled on “South of Cancer” as a suitable catch-all for these diverse tendencies.

Keywords
Modern Movement, Modern architecture, Tropical architecture, Modern diaspora, Design with climate.

Issue 63
Year 2020
Pages 4-5
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.52200/63.A.IN6GWK9B

PDF (English)
Tropical Architecture, South of Cancer in the Modern Diaspora

Abstract
Getting back to the point of “Tropical architecture,” architecture in the humid tropics is collaboration with nature to establish a new order in which human beings may live in harmony with their surroundings. As publications at the time concentrated on French and British colonies, to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the Modern Movement diaspora, it is essential to revisit, analyse, and document the important heritage built south of the Tropic of Cancer, where the debate took place and architectonic models were reproduced, and in many cases subjected to metamorphoses stemming from their antipodal geography. Notable for the modernity of its social, urban, and architectonic programs, and also its formally and technologically sustained research, the modern architecture of these latitudes below the tropics constitutes a distinctive heritage.

Keywords
Modern Movement, Modern architecture, Tropical architecture, Modern diaspora, Design with climate.

Issue 63
Year 2020
Pages 2-3
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.52200/63.A.9Y0PTL3F

PDF (English)
Spanish Pantheon in Rome. A Permanent Abode

Abstract
The Spanish Pantheon in the Campo di Verano was entrusted to three resident artists at the Academy of Spain in Rome in 1957: architects José María García de Paredes (1924-1990) and Javier Carvajal (1926-2013) and sculptor Joaquín García Donaire (1926-2003). They proposed an open space devoid of religious symbols apart from the chapels around it. This work explores a new direction that moves away from the usual funerary monument: a symbolic space composed of two planes in equilibrium laid out on a smooth platform where there is no distinction between sculpture and architecture. This place is for those who take time to pause here, a permanent abode, to spend time with the absent and the present.

Keywords
Modern Movement, Modern architecture, José Maria García de Paredes, Javier Carvajal, Joaquín Garcia Donaire, Italian modern architecture, Funerary monument.

Issue 62
Year 2020
Pages 94-99
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.52200/62.A.0990J5PI

PDF (English)
Charles Fulton: the regional reach of modernism in Australia

Abstract
Charles Fulton (1905-1987) was an Australian architect who applied influences of European Modernism, particularly the civic architecture of Willem Dudok, into the design for several hospital projects in regional towns across Queensland, at the same time adapting a climatic responsive rationale to the projects. As with many remote contexts that have been overlooked by a European and American centric focus upon Modern architecture, the account of Australian Modernism has not been widely acknowledged outside its borders, despite a local momentum to effectively document and publish its achievements. Compounding this predicament, Queensland has suffered from its own exclusion relative to the southern states of New South Wales (Sydney) and Victoria (Melbourne), which have always been the dominant centers of the national profession, its conferences and publications. This paper seeks to address these schisms through the presentation of the work of Fulton, demonstrating how even in remote areas of Queensland, thousands of kilometers from major cities, the reach of Modern architecture found a place. Mobilized by the national federal body, the Office of Health and Home Affairs, drive to improve health services across the country post WWI, Fulton became a leading architect to modernize health facilities and brought about a cultural shift in the reception of Modern architecture across the regions.

Keywords
Modern Movement, Modern architecture, Healthcare architecture, Form and Function, Healing architecture, Charles Fulton, Australian modern architecture.

Issue 62
Year 2020
Pages 86-93
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.52200/62.A.AGPQON3Z

PDF (English)