Laughing at Architecture: Architectural Histories of Humour, Satire and Wit

Description

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 modernization, 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. Cover Half-title Title Copyright Contents List of Figures List of Contributors Humour: A Lens for the Architectural and Urban Historian 1. Laughing at the Baroque: A Drawing and Some Texts Compared 2. From Reportage to Ridicule: Satirizing the Building Industry in the Eighteenth-Century Irish Press 3. The Thorn of Scorn: John Nash and his All Souls Church for a Transformed Regency London 4. ‘A Joke that Has Gone on Far Too Long’: Mocking the Completion of the New Hôtel des Postes de Paris (1886–1888) 5. Deconstructing Gaudí: Entangled Relationships between Satire and Architectural Criticism 6. Confronting Problems with a Sense of Humour: Adolf Loos’s Architectural Polemics and Viennese Journalism 7. Words and Images of Contempt: Il Selvaggio on Architecture (1926–1942) 8. Osbert Lancaster: Architectural Humour in the Time of Functionalism 9. Irrational Interiors: The Modern Domestic Landscape Seen in Caricatures 10. From ‘Little Russia’ to ‘Planet of the Apes’: Nicknaming Twentieth-Century Mass Housing in Belgium 11. Saul Steinberg’s ‘Graph Paper Architecture’: Humorous Drawings and Diagrams as Instruments of Critique 12. The Modern City through the Mirror of Humour: A Different Portrait 13. Splendid?! Preposterous! Chinese Artists Mock the Architectural Spectacle Index