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Research Faculty Current Endeavors
5. Modern Architecture Anderson, Dutta, and Jarzombek have established their careers in this field. Stanford Anderson has been identified with research on early modernism ever since his path-breaking dissertation on Peter Behrens from Columbia University in 1968, published by MIT Press in 2000 as Peter Behrens and a New Architecture for the Twentieth Century. He has worked on a range of modernist topics, including studies on Louis Kahn, vernacular architectural forms, and the history of city planning. He has also published a translation and introductory essay to an important early modernist polemical writing by Hermann Muthesius. Anderson is now collaborating on a book, Alvar Aalto and America, that grows out of an international conference he organized at MIT in 1999.Arindam Dutta’s first book, The Bureaucracy of Beauty, focuses on the late nineteenth-century English art industry and design and its relationship to informal modes of production in the metropole and the colony. Critical to his research are the ties between industry, political economy, administrative mores, and the emergent modernist aesthetic. Other work in preparation addresses the relationship between the political economic theories of land, and aesthetic notions of landscape beginning from the eighteenth century. Dutta has initiated a collaborative project on the history of MIT's "expertise" in the field of architecture and planning in the immediate post-war period. The book's key suit is to examine the manner in which the American research complex offered an alternative system of intellectual patronage which MIT architects and planners significantly appropriated; thus wittingly or unwittingly bypassing the dominant pedagogical strains of the profession produced by the late CIAM. Mark Jarzombek has worked on projects centering on early modern German architecture and politics, and in particular on the Werkbund. An article on the fin-de-siècle Austrian theorist Joseph August Lux was in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 63/1 (June 2004). And while her focus is not on architecture per se, Caroline Jones has theorized the subject of modernity in her 2005 book Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses; the hygienic modernist subject also comes under scrutiny in her 2006 edited volume Sensorium: Embodied experience, technology, and contemporary art. HTC has had visiting faculty who work on modernist architecture to teach for one semester. These have included Beatriz Colomina, John Rajchman, Alice Friedman, Diane Ghirardo, Hélène Lipstadt and Kazys Varnelis.
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