Beatriz Colomina

Manifesto Architecture – The Ghost of Mies Beatriz Colomina

The third title in the celebrated Critical Spatial Practice series, Manifesto Architecture argues that the history of the avant-garde (in architecture and other disciplines) can t be separated from the history of its engagement with media. It is not just that the avant-garde used media to publicize its work;
the work did not exist before its publication. In her succinct text, architectural historian Beatriz Colomina, director of the Media and Modernity program at Princeton University, traces the history of the modern architecture manifesto, from Le Corbusier s Towards a New Architecture to Robert Venturi s Complexity and Contradiction. With a particular focus on Mies van der Rohe and the play between his written and built work, this essay propels the manifesto form into the future, suggesting that we are now in the age of the soft manifesto.

Published by Sternberg Press, Berlin