Modernity and Rurality: Mapping the State of Research (conference session)

Rurality appears as an emerging frame of reference in European discourses around the built environment, upsetting the longstanding lack of interest for rural areas of both the design disciplines and their histories. While some modernist architecture has sought, throughout its development, to find inspiration in vernacular and rural architecture, as a presumed source of authenticity and rationality, it was in the cities that this movement identified its preferred field of operations. Similarly goes with the development of modernist urban planning and design, where the importation of countryside’s environmental and social qualities to the urban sphere was meant to reform and cure the ill-perceived large industrial cities. This session deals with an overlooked topic in architectural history – modernist design and planning in and for the countryside –, addressing the relation between experiments in designing the physical environment and rurality at large. Examining the works of prominent o r lesser-known modern ist heroes, as much as those of obscure engineers active at the European periphery, it unveils unnoticed episodes in architectural history, spanning across key moments the modern era, disciplinary approaches, and scales. In doing so, this session offers an outline of different modernist attitudes towards rurality. Among the transversal issues raised across the session, one finds: 1) Alternately progressive and reactionary ontologies of the rural and nature: from more romantic, individualistic and subjective attempts to reconcile humans and nature, to the invocation of the rural’s alleged moralising influence on individuals or collectivities; from escapist to merely functional uses of the countryside; 2) Uneven architectural boldness, oscillating between the imitation of the allegedly authentic vernacular,efforts to root emerging modernist styles in tradition, and the introduction of radically new architectural languages in the countryside, whether or not in connection with quests for national identity or even with totalitarian rhetorics; 3) An inclination towards the dissolution of architectural design in favor of growing concerns for village design, regional planning, landscape, and even social planning and engineering; 4) The autonomy or adherence of design stances to the underlying agrarian systems. The extremely diversified range of the discussed case studies, while suggesting an expansion of architectural history’s boundaries, sparks a potentially promising debate around the most appropriate conceptual frameworks and methodologies to approach the entanglements modernism and rurality. *** Speakers: 1° Espen Johnsen, University of Oslo: To Subordinate, Unite or Confront Architecture with Nature? Knut Knutsen’s Regionalist Strategies and Their Impact 2° Sarah M. Schlachetzki, University of Bern: “Architecture, in the Sense of Prewar Times, is Dying.” –– Ernst May’s Housing Schemes in Weimar’s Rural East 3° Sabrina Puddu, University of Hertfordshire / Leeds Beckett University: Agrarian Penal Colonies and the Project of Modern Rurality in Italy 4° Kristof Fatsar, Writtle University College: “Only Human Tirelessness Built on Science Can Conquer the Desert”: Planned Agricultural Communities in Early 19th Century Hungary