White Walls, Designer Dresses – the Fashioning of Modern Architecture - Hardcover

Wigley, Mark

4.04

26 ratings by Goodreads

9780262231855: White Walls, Designer Dresses – the Fashioning of Modern Architecture

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262231859 ISBN 13: 9780262231855

Publisher: MIT Press, 1996

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Mark Wigley offers an understanding of the historical avant-garde. He explores a feature of modern architecture - white walls. Although the white wall exemplifies the stripping away of the decorative masquerade costumes worn by 19th-century buildings, Wigley argues that modern buildings are not naked. The white wall is itself a form of clothing - the newly athletic body of the building, like that of its occupants, wears a new kind of garment and these garments are meant to match. Not only did almost all modern architects literally design dresses, Wigley points out, their arguments for a modern architecture were taken from the logic of clothing reform. Architecture was understood as a form of dress design. Wigley follows the trajectory of this key subtext by closely reading the statements and design of most of the protagonists, demonstrating that it renders modern architecture's relationship with the psychosexual economy of fashion much more ambiguous than the architects' endlessly repeated rejections of fashion would suggest. Indeed, Wigley asserts, the very intensity of these rejections is a symptom of how deeply they are embedded in the world of clothing. By drawing on arguments about the relationship between clothing and architecture first formulated in the middle of the 19th century, modern architects in fact presented a sophisticated theory of the surface, modernizing architecture by transforming the status of the surface. "White Walls, Designer Dresses" shows how this seemingly incidental clothing logic actually organizes the detailed design of the modern building, dictating a system of polychromy, understood as a multicoloured outfit. The familiar image of modern architecture as white turns out to be the effect of a historiographical tradition that has worked hard to suppress the colour of the surfaces of the buildings that it describes. Wigley analyzes this suppression in terms of the sexual logic that invariably accompanies discussions of clothing and colour, recovering those sensuously coloured surfaces and the extraordinary arguments about clothing that were used to defend them.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

" A brilliant and masterful work that forces one to reconsider essential aspects of modernities, obsessions, and representations." -- Mark Jarzombek, M.I.T. " Mark Wigley's book is a major challenge to the received history of twentieth-century architecture. Its brilliant inquiry into the exceptional role played by " whiteness" in modern design brings to light all the unexamined assumptions and rhetorical operations through which a certain image of the modern has become entrenched in architectural thought. A virtuoso reader of buildings and texts, Wigley shows how much had to be forgotten, finessed, or placed beyond question for the canonical histories of the modern movement to do their work. In the process, he brings the discussion of modern architecture to a new level of conceptual sharpness and historical self-awareness." -- Norman Bryson, Harvard University & quot; A brilliant and masterful work that forces one to reconsider essential aspects of modernities, obsessions, and representations.& quot; -- Mark Jarzombek, M.I.T. & quot; Mark Wigley's book is a major challenge to the received history of twentieth-century architecture. Its brilliant inquiry into the exceptional role played by & quot; whiteness& quot; in modern design brings to light all the unexamined assumptions and rhetorical operations through which a certain image of the modern has become entrenched in architectural thought. A virtuoso reader of buildings and texts, Wigley shows how much had to be forgotten, finessed, or placed beyond question for the canonical histories of the modern movement to do their work. In the process, he brings the discussion of modern architecture to a new level of conceptual sharpness and historical self-awareness.& quot; -- Norman Bryson, Harvard University "Mark Wigley's book is a major challenge to the received history of twentieth-century architecture. Its brilliant inquiry into the exceptional role played by "whiteness" in modern design brings to light all the unexamined assumptions and rhetorical operations through which a certain image of the modern has become entrenched in architectural thought. A virtuoso reader of buildings and texts, Wigley shows how much had to be forgotten, finessed, or placed beyond question for the canonical histories of the modern movement to do their work. In the process, he brings the discussion of modern architecture to a new level of conceptual sharpness and historical self-awareness."--Norman Bryson, Harvard University "A brilliant and masterful work that forces one to reconsider essential aspects of modernities, obsessions, and representations."--Mark Jarzombek, M.I.T.

From the Author:

Response to Reviewer
You rightly note that this book's obsessive exploration of the white wall in modern architecture is not extended into the equally fascinating question of the white space of the gallery. But this is obviously not because I think the surface of the gallery wall is neutral. On the contrary. In the very sentence you refer to, I put the word "neutral" in inverted commas precisely to make it clear that the neutrality of the gallery wall is mythological. I share your fascination with the role of the white wall in the exhibition of art but feel that it has to be subjected to its own exhaustive study before we start making comparisons between the white wall in art and architecture. The close relationships between artists and architects during this period does not erase the different geneologies at work. The white wall of the gallery has its own specificity, which needs to be respected. The ways in which it is not neutral do not simply overlap with the ways the white wall in architecture is not neutral. A more nuanced reading needed.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.