Abstract
Modern Architecture and Urbanism are the concrete results of a series of urban and design experiments that, during the first and second industrial revolution took place in Western and Eastern European countries and came to define the practices of the world of construction, prefabrication and design in the context of full industrialization. Five words could be identified that describe the methods and the processes underlying modern urban design, building a Mantra of Modern Architecture still in vogue: Technocracy, Hygienism, Formal Reduction, Cost-effectiveness and Communitarianism. This paper aims at analysing and clarifying how the Mantra of Modernism has been applied in non-European settlement and how it can constitute the conceptual base towards the construction of an alternative contemporary modernity.
Maddalena d’Alfonso conceives the Mantra and states of the time frame; Jacopo Galli did the archives researches, the clarifications in the state of the art and the language simplifications.
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Notes
- 1.
The Veda is an ancient collection of Scythian texts from the twentieth century BC, which are a fundamental reference to Hinduism. Literally, Veda means understanding, knowledge and wisdom.
- 2.
The escalation of epidemics in the West African coast has caused the terrible reputation of this continent’s defined White Man’s Grave, the term was officially used to define Sierra Leone and then extended to the whole continent.
- 3.
Writer James Baldwin (1924–1987), one of the most prominent racial equality activists at a Cambridge Union conference on 17 February 1965, said: the future of the negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country, “It is entirely up to the American people and our representatives—it is entirely up to the American people whether or not they are going to face and deal with and embrace this stranger whom they relied on so long.
- 4.
During his teaching period in Dundee, Patrick Geddes matures his thoughts on town planning, where he considers urban planning closely related to social justice. Geddes will practice this thought in different parts of Britain and India between 1914 and 1924. G. Ferraro, Rieducazione alla speranza: Patrick Geddes, planner in India, 1914–1924, Jaca Book, 1998, Milan.
- 5.
Giuseppe Pagano organized the exhibition Architetura Rurale Italiana in 1936 during the VI Triennale di Milano.
- 6.
In the classical economy, there are three main areas on which the concept is based: (1) systemic vision, (2) decision-making autonomy and (3) economic equilibrium, so it does not coincide with the principle of economic and monetary convenience.
- 7.
In 1955, at the Bandung Conference, economist Alfred Sauvy (1898–1990) defined the First World as the Western, Democratic and Capitalist Free Market, Second World the Economic Union of Socialist Countries associated with the Soviet Union and Third World that of the developing countries, mainly ex-colonies in search of their own socio-political identity and economic policy.
- 8.
J. Baldwin, Fly in the Buttermilk, a short story written by James Baldwin, where he discusses the challenges faced by an African–American boy in an American school.
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d’Alfonso, M., Galli, J. (2018). The Mantra of Modernity. In: Petrillo, A., Bellaviti, P. (eds) Sustainable Urban Development and Globalization. Research for Development. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61988-0_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61988-0_16
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