Three Cultural Ecologies reverses common conceptions of modern architecture. It reveals how selected works of two modern architects, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, embraced environmental and cultural conditions as reciprocal and complementary. A basic premise of this book’s arguments is that cultural patterns cannot be adequately conceptualized in the terms that typically define ecology today. Instead, studies based on the natural sciences must be complemented by descriptions and interpretations of historical narratives, cultural norms, and individual expressions. Previously unpublished images and new interpretations will allow readers to rediscover works they thought they knew; Villa Savoye, Taliesin, La Tourette, and Ocatilla; as well as projects that are less well known: by Wright, the House on the Mesa and the City Residential Plan, and by Le Corbusier, the Immeuble-villas and Ilôt Insalubre projects. More broadly, this study of cultural ecology at three scales – domestic, monastic, and urban – reconsiders the history of modern architecture. The conditions brought about by societal and technological modernization and confronted by modern architecture have not disappeared in our time, but have intensified, making the task of imagining how some measure of equilibrium between culture and ecology might be achieved even more pressing.
- ISBN10 0367207265
- ISBN13 9780367207267
- Publish Date 12 June 2019 (first published 21 August 2017)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Imprint Routledge
- Format Paperback
- Pages 226
- Language English