Chapter 4: The Style of the Present: Constructivism and Poetism
Peter Zusi
From The Integrity of the Avant-Garde: Karel Teige and the Biography of an Ambition (2024), pp. 129-160, doi:10.59860/vc.c7c4b96
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| Part of the book: The Integrity of the Avant-Garde Peter Zusi Legenda Abstract. Chapter 4 discusses in detail Teige’s famous polemic in which he accused Le Corbusier’s ‘Mundaneum’ design of retrograde monumentality and historicism. Background context includes not only their previously friendly and mutually supportive relationship, but also deep sources for Teige’s thought such as Nietzsche and the Czech literary and art critic F. X. Šalda (1865-1936). The chapter argues that the dominant account in architectural histories of this debate requires amendment in the light of aspects of Teige’s thought that those histories have generally overlooked: in particular, the combination of Teige’s stern Constructivist rigour with the ludic freedom represented by Poetism. Full text. This contribution is published as Open Access and can be downloaded as a PDF, or viewed as a PDF in your web browser, here: |
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