Overview
Model House – Mapping Transcultural Modernisms investigates and maps out the network of encounters, transnational influences, and local appropriations of an Architectural Modernity as manifested in various ways in Israel, India, and China. The project focuses on the manifold relationships and actors involved in the implementation and realization of architectural projects that served as exemplary standard models for Western societies and beyond. The examination of modernism as a transnational and transcultural project is based on three case studies that were built during the time of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s, but until now were mainly examined and described from the perspective of Western or nation-centered historiography. Model House responds to the Eurocentric discourse on modernism with a multiperspectival and polycentric form of artistic and cultural studies-based knowledge production informed by postcolonial critique. Model House develops and pursues forms of practice and presentation distinguished by the equal use of artistic, theoretical, and empirical methods in their respective networks.
This project is founded by the WWTF (Wiener Wissenschafts-, Forschungs- und Technologiefonds) and supported by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.