A novel exploration of the idea of nonlinear time and its place at the heart of modern art and architecture Through much of the twentieth century, a diverse group of thinkers engaged in an interdisciplinary conversation about the meaning of time and history for modern art and architecture. The group included architects Louis Kahn, Everett Victor Meeks, James Gamble Rogers, Paul Rudolph, and Eero Saarinen; artists Anni and Josef Albers; philosopher Paul Weiss; and art historians Henri Focillon, George Kubler, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, and Vincent Scully. These figures were unified by their resistance to the idea that, to be considered modern, art and architecture had to be of its time, as well as by the pivotal role that Yale University held as a backdrop to their thinking. These thinkers sponsored a new kind of approach, one that Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen terms "untimely," emphasizing a departure from a sequential course of events. Ideas about temporal duration, new tradition, the presence of the past, and the shape of time were among the concepts they explored. With an interdisciplinary focus, Pelkonen reveals previously unexplored connections among key figures of American intellectual and artistic culture at midcentury whose works and words would shape modern architecture.
Pelkonen's text leaves no doubt that Austria's contribution to post-war architecture and discourse lives liminally and radically, and that Graz is the place to go to rediscover architecture's lost sense of adventure and innocence. This book reminds us that architecture--in order to be engaged--calls first for a state of mind. Pelkonen presents hers with brave analogies, critical charm, and elegant ghost-discourses." -- Roger Connah, Architectural Historian "Really good work should make a scholar just a bit jealous. Pelkonen's work has that quality. Here is a fresh voice; she has something important to say and does so with conviction and authority. Pelkonen brings to her discussion an extraordinary command of the presupposed artistic and intellectual climate. I know of no book that quite does what she here succeeds in doing." -- Karsten Harries, Professor of Philosophy, Yale University "Beware Architecture!" Architecture that entails surprise, even danger, is the subject of this exciting discourse on a body of work that has gained increasing international attention since the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Graz and Vienna came to represent the radical edge of European architecture. Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen looks at how this architecture tests the limits of the modern tradition, bringing to light work that is little known yet extremely consequential for contemporary theoretical discourse.
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