Late Modernism and Other Latenesses - by Chris Grimley & Michael Kubo & Enrique Ramirez & Mimi Zeiger (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Reflects on the modern impulse for rushed production, expansion, and consumption.

Hurry up, we're late: The early decades of the twenty-first century have demonstrated that we are already behind. Concepts like Moore's Law, accelerationism, hyperloop, and rapid news cycles push the notion that speed is the answer. Modern-day futurists argue that salvation lies in technology and outer space, while architecture has strived to keep pace with cultural events through the late twentieth century and into the present, even as we face environmental crises and build our lives around the remnants of late modernism.

Late Modernism and Other Latenesses offers an understanding of the contradictory impulses in architecture and culture from the 1960s through the 1980s, a period rich in utopian visions and revolution but also burdened by global expansionism and crisis. Topical essays explore aspects of lateness, referring to concrete buildings and architectural projects, and key texts from the period. The concept of lateness is used not as a backward-looking tool but as one that is simply behind the beat. The book is a reaction and rebuttal to the surging flows of finance, media, and culture that influence architectural production and its aligned disciplines, seeking missing conditions that might redefine architecture's relationship to its cultural moment.

About the Author

Chris Grimley is the founder and creative director of Boston-based design and communications studio SIGNALS. Michael Kubo is an architectural historian and associate professor at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Enrique Ramirez is a writer and a historian of art and architecture, who is a lecturer at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, and visiting associate professor at the Pratt Institute in New York. Mimi Zeiger is a Los Angeles-based critic, editor, and curator.