Estranging Forms

Supervisors: Marina Lathouri, David Cunningham

This thesis is concerned with the various ways that architectural modernism of the interwar era functioned as an instrument of ideology. This complex and historically specific function is explored through the catalytic agency of a conceptual pair: (social) alienation and (aesthetic) estrangement, the latter as the avant-garde artistic device of de-alienation. The two terms, wholly associated with the evolution of capitalist economy and the practices of the historical avant-garde respectively, can manifest in a concrete way the linguistic and conceptual reworking of the discourse on ideology, which took place during its migration through the disciplines of philosophy and political economy, to the aesthetic practices, and eventually to the spatial production of architecture. In other words, thethesis studies by what means alienation, after becoming closely interdependent on the ideological and cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie, was perceived by the historical avant-garde and defied in practice by the conception of the homonymous device of alienation or estrangement, and, primarily, how interwar architectural modernism attempted to transform the ‘negative’ function of this device into a ‘positive’ possibility for a de-alienated restructuring of human production.

Alexandra Vougia (Thessaloniki, 1983) is a practicing architect and PhD researcher. She graduated in 2007 from the Faculty of Architecture of the Aristotle University, Thessaloniki – Greece, and holds a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design - MS AAD from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation - GSAPP, Columbia University (2008). Alexandra has worked as an architect in New York and Athens, before beginning her PhD dissertation at the AA School of Architecture in 2011.

[IMAGE] ABC, “ABC Demands the Dictatorship of the Machine - ABC fordert die Diktatur der Maschine.”
In ABC – Beiträge zum Bauen: 1924-1928. Eindhoven: Afdeling Bouwkunde-Technische Hogeschool, 1969.