Laughing at Architecture

Laughing at Architecture
Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages : 291
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781350022768
ISBN-13 : 1350022764
Rating : 4/5 (68 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Laughing at Architecture by : Michela Rosso

Download or read book Laughing at Architecture written by Michela Rosso and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-29 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 modernisation, 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.


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