Art & Art History ETDs

Publication Date

4-13-2022

Abstract

Histories of European and U.S. modernism conventionally accept that Enlightenment rational thought set modern architecture’s terms and criteria in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Rationalism privileges visual and material properties; distinguishes between art, architecture, and craft; and identifies space with the structure that frames it. It normalized the view that buildings stand fixed, independent of our interaction with them, and perpetuates assumptions about what physically defines domestic space. Consequently, Japan’s significance for modern domestic space in Europe and the U.S. has been interpreted as structurally evident. Simultaneously, the architecture of European and U.S. modernists who did not think like rationalists has remained elusive. This dissertation revisits the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Adolf Loos, and Eileen Gray from a phenomenological perspective—a perspective grounded in the spatial and temporal continuity of lived experience. Phenomenological analysis reveals that Japanese craft practices fundamentally shaped these modernists’ approaches to architecture in ways that have been mutually obscured by rationalism.

Project Sponsors

The Bainbridge Bunting Fine Arts Scholarship, Henry Luce Foundation Scholarship, Ralph W. Douglass Endowed Scholarship, an Alumni Scholarship, and a Student Research Grant awarded by the UNM Graduate and Professional Student Association

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Art History

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

UNM Department of Art and Art History

First Committee Member (Chair)

Christopher Curtis Mead

Second Committee Member

Susanne Anderson-Riedel

Third Committee Member

Olivia Libby Lumpkin

Fourth Committee Member

Ken Tadashi Oshima

Keywords

modernism, modern architecture, Japan, craft, domestic architecture, domestic space

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