“Other” Modernisms

The conference proceeded from the consensus that the mainstream historiographic construction of twentieth-century modernism through its canonic texts and buildings has marginalized or suppressed some modern trajectories, which are now gaining an unprecedented legitimacy as the subject matter of revisionist histories. Today the exclusive, totalizing and teleological histories of modern architecture are highly suspect and the presumed internal consistency and morphological integrity of modernism is no longer taken for granted by recent critical approaches in line with contemporary scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. Recent literature has shed light on the differences within orthodox modernism itself, and questioned its canonical definitions. In addition, “non-western” contexts from Asia, Africa to South America or to the east of Europe, have been increasingly studied to broaden the limits of modernist production beyond Western Europe and North America, which were hitherto seen as centers of Modernism. Instead of a modernist mainstream, we now talk about a plurality of modernisms both within the global context and within individual societies comprising it.