Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer Book

"In this original, rigorous, and sophisticated study K. Michael Hays draws on European theory to illuminate the philosophical and epistemological assumptions of the utopian and revolutionary architectural avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s. Hays breaks new ground in identifying the gradual disappearance of the autonomous subject as a central motif of modern architectural theory." -- Anson Rabinbach, The Cooper Union Drawing both on the work of modern theorists like Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Siegfried Kracauer and on more recent poststructuralist thought, K. Michael Hays creates an entirely new method of reading architectural production. Challenging much of the traditional wisdom about modernism and the avant-garde, Hays argues that a rigorously articulated "posthumanist" position was actually developed in the modernist architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer. He reinterprets their buildings, projects, and writings as constructions of this new category of subjectivity.Read More