From Within / From Outside: Mass Media and the International Spread of Post-War Architecture

Abstract

This monographic issue of the journal HPA attempts to map the international spread of architectural culture in the mass media after the Second World War, taking the period 1945–1960 as a time frame.^[1]

It focuses on how certain ideas about the city and contemporary architecture were disseminated through periodical publications, exhibitions and conferences by analyzing a series of monographic case studies in an attempt to answer some essential questions:

1. How was an architectural and/or urban design project with ties to a specific context presented in the international sphere through state, professional and educational channels—whether institutional or otherwise?

2. How did this occur during a period of radical cultural reconstruction and fundamental disciplinary redefinition?

3. And vice versa: how was the same project interpreted from the point of view of the foreign establishment?

4. How did the vision “from within” and the perspectives “from outside” interact?

We believe that analyzing this type of “external” perspective (specifically: how the architectural world of one country looks at the architecture of another) offers a productive path toward a historiographic renewal of studies centered on the processes affecting the international dissemination of modern architecture, beginning from the early years after the Second World War in Europe.

^[1] The editors of this monograph were supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities and by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) of the European Union. Research project: Spanish Architecture in International Communication Media: Publications, Exhibitions, Congresses (First part: 1940-1975), reference number HAR2017-85205-P (MICINN / AIE / ERDF, EU).