Modernism and the Spirit of the City

This collection of essays offers a new reading of the architectural modernism that emerged and flourished in Europe in the first half of the 20th century. Rejecting the fashionable postmodernist arguments of the 1980s and '90s which damned modernist architecture as banal and monotous, the essays investigate the complex cultural, social and religious imperatives that lay below the smooth, white surfaces of new architecture.