Concrete thoughts: modern architecture and contemporary art

Abstract

This publication explores the productive ground between the imaginative potential of the architectural project and its everyday experience. The central essays question the ways in which space is experienced and how theoretical innovation does not always translate so easily to everyday use. The catalogue goes beyond the surface rhetoric of the early post-war architectural project – and any ‘utopian’ aspirations that might be associated with it – opening up the tensions between an ‘image’ of the post-war environment and its actual ‘use’. concrete thoughts – modern architecture and contemporary art also contains essays on each of the three featured artists, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Toby Paterson and Jane & Louise Wilson. The artists have all engaged with spatial themes in the urban landscape of early post-war Britain. This was a period in which many architectural projects were marked by an ambitious sense of potential, possibility and innovation, yet the actual built projects proved somewhat more complex and problematic in practice.