Thesis (M.S.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2004. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 110-111). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2004. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 110-111). Also available on the Internet.

This dissertation traces the emergence of the air raid shelter as the paradigmatic architecture of air defense under the Nationalist Party government in China during the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945). More broadly, it explores how air defense in general became an integral technology for the Nationalists’ “war of resistance and reconstruction” (kangzhan jianguo), a fascist project derived from total war, the globally circulating military-political idea that modern wars would enlist the entire populations and economies of nations in warfare while subjecting national populations and infrastructures to equally comprehensive violence. The Nationalists joined the world in confronting aerial bombing after the Empire of Japan bombed Shanghai in 1932. In response, the government and its military constructed air defense, a political and technological complex combining mass mobilization, through air raid drills and air defense organizations, with material technologies, like searchlights, anti-aircraft guns, and bomb shelters. The Nationalists found in air defense more than a military technology. To them, it also offered a set of tools and resources for fortifying their flailing attempts to unite China in a common national project, and even recasting the substance of that project. Air defense could forge a new society that invested all Chinese people in war as a necessary precondition for overcoming China’s colonial subjection. Where democratic institutions collapsed and appeals to common heritage and customs failed, the Nationalists used air defense to turn survival (shengcun) into the bedrock value of the national community. Meanwhile, a group of young architects associated with the journal Xin jianzhu in Canton identified air defense as an organizing problem for the nascent professional field of architecture. Rather than the stale historicism endorsed in Nanjing, and against China’s craft building traditions, the group championed modernist architecture, especially the International Style, whose principles of simplicity, functionalism, and rationality they saw as necessary for building modern, industrial, and hygienic Chinese cities capable of enhancing human life. Moreover, they argued that the technological instrumentality informing modernism made it the only style capable of preserving Chinese cities and people from modern threats like bombing. After the fall of Canton in 1938, members of the group took their mission to Chongqing, where they joined the Nationalist government in building air defenses in the wartime capital. In particular, this dissertation argues that the air raid shelter and air defense focused contradictions in the Nationalists’ fascist project for uniting and revolutionizing China as it traveled to Chongqing following the Nationalist escape from Japan’s invasion of the coast. Over the course of the War of Resistance, the principal technology of air defense shifted away from mass mobilization, as the Nationalists came to administer refugees and displaced people they had never governed before, and became located in infrastructure like city plans and air raid shelters. Air defense served to exclude surplus populations like women and the elderly, rendered redundant according to the state’s wartime needs for industrial production and conscripts, by dispersing them in satellite settlements outside the city, from which they constantly returned in search of work or material goods. Shoddy air raid shelters, in the meantime, revealed the fragile biology of real bodies beneath the fascist fantasy of the heroic political subject, as shelters failed to provide for basic needs like respiration. Over time, these two problems collided, as the state closed shelters in the city to dispersed people, exposing surplus populations to bombing, while civilians also languished in shelters that could still kill them. The goal of building national unity through survival collapsed into a confusion of inclusion and exclusion, life and death, with disastrous results, like the asphyxiation of around one thousand people in Chongqing’s largest public air raid shelter in June 1941. In these circumstances, professionals like the Cantonese architects and new state regulatory bodies produced proposals and standards for building better shelters, offering a technological resolution of air defense’s political contradictions and consolidating the transformation of air defense into a technical expertise.

This dissertation traces the emergence of the air raid shelter as the paradigmatic architecture of air defense under the Nationalist Party government in China during the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945). More broadly, it explores how air defense in general became an integral part of the Nationalists’ “war of resistance and reconstruction” (kangzhan jianguo), a fascist project derived from total war, the globally circulating military-political idea holding that modern warfare would enlist entire nations and their economies in war while also subjecting them to comprehensive enemy violence. The Nationalists joined the world in confronting aerial bombing after the Empire of Japan bombed Shanghai in 1932. In response, the government and its military constructed air defense, a political and technological complex combining mass mobilization, through air raid drills and air defense organizations, with material technologies, like searchlights, anti-aircraft guns, and bomb shelters. The Nationalists found in air defense more than a military technology. To them, it also offered a set of tools and resources for fortifying their flailing attempts to unite China in a common national project, and even recasting the substance of that project. Air defense could forge a new society that invested all Chinese people in war as a necessary precondition for overcoming China’s colonial subjection. Where democratic institutions collapsed and appeals to common heritage and customs failed, the Nationalists used air defense to turn survival (shengcun) into the bedrock value of the national community. Meanwhile, a group of young architects associated with the journal Xin jianzhu in Canton identified air defense as an organizing problem for the nascent professional field of architecture. Rather than the stale historicism endorsed in Nanjing, and against China’s craft building traditions, the group championed modernist architecture, especially the International Style, whose principles of simplicity, functionalism, and rationality they saw as necessary for building modern, industrial, and hygienic Chinese cities capable of enhancing human life. Moreover, they argued that the technological instrumentality informing modernism made it the only style capable of preserving Chinese cities and people from modern threats like bombing. After the fall of Canton in 1938, members of the group took their mission to Chongqing, where they joined the Nationalist government in building air defenses in the wartime capital. In particular, this dissertation argues that the air raid shelter and air defense focused contradictions in the Nationalists’ fascist project for uniting and revolutionizing China as it traveled to Chongqing following the Nationalist escape from Japan’s invasion of the coast. Over the course of the war, the principal technology of air defense shifted away from mass mobilization, as the Nationalists came to administer refugees and displaced people they had never governed before, and became located in infrastructure like city plans and air raid shelters. Air defense served to exclude surplus populations like women and the elderly, rendered redundant according to the state’s wartime needs for industrial production and conscripts, by dispersing them in satellite settlements outside the city, from which they constantly returned in search of work or material goods. Shoddy air raid shelters, in the meantime, revealed the fragile biology of real bodies beneath the fascist fantasy of the heroic political subject, as shelters failed to provide for basic needs like respiration. Over time, these two problems collided, as the state closed shelters in the city to dispersed people, exposing surplus populations to bombing, while civilians also languished in shelters that could still kill them. The goal of building national unity through survival collapsed into a confusion of inclusion and exclusion, life and death, with disastrous results, like the asphyxiation of around one thousand people in Chongqing’s largest public air raid shelter in June 1941. In these circumstances, professionals like the Cantonese architects and new state regulatory bodies produced proposals and standards for building better shelters, attempting a technical resolution of air defense’s political contradictions and consolidating the transformation of air defense into a primarily technological discipline.

Cette thèse de doctorat constitue la première étude transversale et systématique de l’œuvre et de la pensée théorique de l’architecte Victor Bourgeois (1897-1962). A contrepied d’une image de Bourgeois formée dans l’historiographie de l’architecture moderne en Belgique, cette étude est basée sur la cohérence fondamentale entre son œuvre d’avant et d’après-guerre, et sur la congruence entre sa théorie et sa pratique. Celles-ci résultent d’un engagement social permanent auquel Bourgeois, aux côtés de son frère, le poète Pierre Bourgeois, désirait donner forme à travers sa pratique professionnelle. <p>L’étude se présente en deux parties :un catalogue raisonné qui offre une vision complète des projets réalisés et non réalisés, ainsi qu’un commentaire et une courte bibliographie par projet. Ceci constitue la seconde partie, le premier volume étant consacré à un essai lui aussi divisé en deux parties. La première rassemble toute l’information disponible dans la littérature consacrée aux années de formation et à la carrière internationale de l’architecte, augmentée de quelques corrections et additions importantes. La seconde explore, sur la base de trois textes clefs, les trois champs d’action par lesquels Bourgeois a donné corps à son engagement social :l’urbanisme, l’architecture et l’éducation.<p>Il est question dans un premier temps de la forme qu’a pris l’engagement social de Victor Bourgeois à travers son œuvre construite. Cette interrogation s’appuie sur les écrits de Bourgeois à ce sujet. Sa réflexion sur la dimension sociale de sa profession est en permanente évolution et se construit autour de termes tels que :« l’art social », « le rendement de l’architecture », « la rationalisation de l’architecture », « la neutralité urbaine, », « la paix plastique », et « le civisme ». Ces concepts sont ici confrontés à quelques-uns de ses projets parmi les plus importants. Les interprétations successives que fait Bourgeois de cette dimension sociale de l’architecture moderne ont pour effet une érosion progressive de sa signification. Cette évolution ne le conduit pas nécessairement à une vision purement technocratique de l’architecture. Après-guerre, ses différentes pensées convergent dans deux textes aux titres révélateurs :De l’architecture au temps d’Erasme à l’humanisme social de notre architecture (1947) et L’architecte et son espace (1955).<p>Dans un second temps, cette thèse retrace la figure de l’urbaniste moderne tel qu’il émerge dans la pensée et la pratique urbanistique de Bourgeois. Alors qu’il était initialement proche des théories socio-biologiques (d’orientation esthétique) de Louis Van der Swaelmen, la figure de l’urbaniste en tant qu’organisateur apparaît progressivement dans ses textes :“L’architecte n’est plus ramené seulement à un rôle de dessinateur ou d’ingénieur, il devient un organisateur de toutes les valeurs utiles.” Et ailleurs: “L’urbaniste est un chef d’orchestre :il doit organiser et hiérarchiser cent, mille instruments différents.” C’est à la fin des années ’30 que la finalité sociale de la pratique urbanistique trouve sa formulation la plus explicite :“L’urbanisme ajuste l’espace au progrès social.” Ses projets urbanistiques des années 30 oscillent entre l’approche architecturo-urbanistique de Ludwig Hilberseimer, le modèle de ville linéaire de Nikolaï Miljutin et les théories du 19e siècle de Patrick Geddes et Paul Otlet. Ses prises de positions radicales aboutiront souvent, sur le terrain, à des solutions pragmatiques.<p>Enfin, dans un troisième temps, la dissertation thématise l’enseignement de Bourgeois. De ses premiers écrits, dans lesquels il défend les propositions de Victor Horta pour la réforme de l’Académie, jusqu’à sa retraite forcée de l’Institut d’Architecture La Cambre (quelques semaines avant sa mort), l’enseignement de l’architecture a été une préoccupation centrale pour Bourgeois. C’est ici que sa réflexion se manifeste le plus explicitement et qu’elle a été – comme il est souvent répété – la plus fertile. L’objectif est double :D’une part nous avons prêté attention à sa réflexion et au développement de sa carrière à l’ISAD-La Cambre ;d’autre part, nous proposons d’éclairer la complexité de sa figure à l’aide d’œuvres d’un certain nombre de ses ‘disciples’ qui revendiquent tous Bourgeois comme leur ‘père spirituel’, et qui ont chacun thématisé un aspect de sa ‘doctrine’ dans leur travail respectif.<p><p>La question en filigrane relève du domaine de la critique architecturale :Quelle est l’approche de Bourgeois? Comment s’est-elle incarnée dans ses projets (réalisés ou non réalisés)? Et enfin, quelles problématiques en constituent le fondement? Plus profondément, en dehors de l’évidente importance d’une documentation extensive et systématique du travail de cette figure majeure du modernisme Belge, ce questionnement a pour ambition d’évaluer le poids et l’importance du travail de Bourgeois. Pourquoi devrions-nous même en discuter encore aujourd’hui? Quelle est la pertinence de son approche au regard de la situation contemporaine?<p>La méthode de recherche utilisée est double. D’une part la thèse est basée sur l’histoire de la réception critique de l’œuvre construite et écrite de Bourgeois. Cette méthode permet d’isoler partiellement le travail (sous tous ses aspects) de l’accumulation d’interprétations dont il a fait l’objet jusqu’ici, et de nous faire prendre conscience de la trop grande simplicité des conclusions auxquelles elles ont souvent mené. D’autre part, la recherche est basée sur une étude comparative de la théorie et de la pratique :les écrits et les bâtiments. Quels effets concrets peut avoir une position théorique sur un projet, et vice versa, que peut nous transmettre un bâtiment des intentions de son créateur?<p>L’essai se propose donc de tracer un portrait complexe et nuancé de Victor Bourgeois. Il y est présenté comme un moderniste qui a cherché la continuité avec la tradition, un iconoclaste radical qui est toujours resté pragmatique. Dans le cas de Bourgeois, cette ambivalence résulte à la fois d’une attitude critique et d’une fascination vis-à-vis de la ville historique. Tout au long de sa carrière, la ville a été l’enjeu principal de son architecture, de sa pensée, de ses textes, de ses voyages et de son approche. Ainsi la thèse étudie Bourgeois en tant qu’éminent représentant d’une autre tradition moderniste qui a cherché, à l’encontre de la Charte d’Athènes, la continuité avec la morphologie de ville existante. <p> / Doctorat en Art de bâtir et urbanisme / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Between 1960 and 1992, American artist George Tsutakawa (1910 – 1997) created more than sixty fountain sculptures for publicly accessible sites in the U.S., Canada, and Japan. The vast majority were made by shaping sheet bronze into geometric and organically inspired abstract forms, often arranged around a vertical axis. Though postwar modernist artistic production and the issues it raises have been widely interrogated since the 1970s, and public art has been a major area of study since about 1980, Tsutakawa's fountains present a major intervention in North America's urban fabric that is not well-documented and remains almost completely untheorized. In addition to playing a key role in Seattle's development as an internationally recognized leader in public art, my dissertation argues that these works provide early evidence of a linked concern with nature and spirituality that has come to be understood as characteristic of the Pacific Northwest. Tsutakawa was born in Seattle, but raised and educated primarily in Japan prior to training as an artist at the University of Washington, then teaching in UW's Schools of Art and Architecture. His complicated personal history, which in World War II included being drafted into the U.S. army, while family members were interned and their property confiscated, led art historian Gervais Reed to declare that Tsutakawa was aligned with neither Japan nor America – that he and his art existed somewhere in-between. There is much truth in Reed's statement; however, artistically, such dualistic assessments deny the rich interplay of cultural allusions in Tsutakawa's fountains. Major inspirations included the Cubist sculpture of Alexander Archipenko, Himalayan stone cairns, Japanese heraldic emblems, First Nations carvings, and Bauhaus theory. Focusing on the early commissions, completed during the 1960s, my study examines the artist's debts to intercultural networks of artistic exchange – between North America, Asia, and Europe – operative in the early and mid-twentieth century, and in some cases before. I argue that, with his fountain sculptures, this Japanese American artist sought to integrate and balance such binaries as nature/culture, intuition/reason, and spiritual/material, which have long served to support the construction of East and West as opposed conceptual categories. / Graduate