• 1 See for example the two new volumes on Brazil and Turkey recently published in the series Modern a (...)
• 2 Duanfang Lu, Third World Modernism: Architecture, Development and Identity, London; New York, ny: (...)

3A challenge to the Eurocentric and North American bias that has dominated the history of architecture since its inception has elicited works that extend their geographical reach well beyond the western world, including previously unexplored countries and regions.1 Emergent countries, such as China, India, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa, have suddenly garnered unparalleled scholarly attention. Among these works, a special place is occupied by essays that challenge current interpretations of the development of modernist architecture in the Third World. They show how architectural and urban modernism, no longer considered as simply another instance of Western expansionist aspirations, acted as a potent vehicle of modernization, economic development, and technological transfer, actively contributing to the construction of these countries’ national and cultural identities.2

• 3 Giorgio Pigafetta, Storia dell’architettura moderna. Imitazione e invenzione fra xv e xx secolo, T (...)

8The first one, written by the architectural historian Giorgio Pigafetta in 2007, advertises itself as an alternative version of the history of architecture between the 15th and 20th centuries.3 For the author, the history of architecture can be narrated as the history of the principle of imitation, a pervasive, immortal, timeless idea that, like a karstic river, finds its way out from time to time despite recurrent attempts to bury it. His Storia dell’architettura moderna is the history of how a code (the classical language of architecture) has continued to be adopted and interpreted by architects and builders over five centuries. This potentially fruitful historical material is then used by the author as a narrative pretext for his original account of the architectural history of the last five centuries. The result is a tableau dotted by permanent factors and continuities rather than innovations, ruptures, and avant-gardes, a history in which the conflicting categories of tradition and originality, modernism and anti-modernism, invention and imitation, constitute a substantial part of its rhetoric.

• 4 Marco Biraghi, Storia dell’architettura contemporanea. 1. 1750–1945, Turin: Einaudi, 1998 (Piccola (...)

9In Marco Biraghi’s Storia dell’architettura contemporanea,4 the label “modernism” is peeled off, revealing a plurality of concepts that require a heterogeneous outlook, and implicitly acknowledging the acceptance of diverse and distant experiences within this broad historiographical category. It is significant that this account of the history of architecture from the origins of the contemporary age (around 1750) to 2008 concludes with the chapter Nuovi riti, nuovi miti [“New rites, new myths”] where the author offers these twelve keywords, mottoes or slogans: Globalization, Architecture as a work of art, New Museums, Junk space, Signature buildings, Eco&Bio, Continuity, Near East, Lightness, Ove Arup, Star-chitect System, After Image. In the trans-historical perspective yielded by this highly pluralistic vision, each one epitomizes a theme relevant to the contemporary age.

• 5 Marco Biraghi and Alberto Ferlenga (eds.), Architettura del Novecento. Teorie, scuole, eventi, Tur (...)

10The episodic, fragmented nature of this narrative is taken to the extreme in volume one of Architettura del Novecento5 by Biraghi and Alberto Ferlenga. It is a collection of essays by 120 authors which together compose a multi-form portrait of the architecture of the 20th century, giving rise to a mosaic of 179 alphabetically arranged entries chosen by the editors, including such general terms, concepts, or keywords as digital architecture, architectural books, materials, museum, landscape, monumentality, etc., along with a selection of architectural magazines, seminal books, academic and research institutions, architectural schools, public exhibitions, and prizes that have substantially influenced or even oriented the course of the architectural history of the last one hundred years. Trying to avoid both the excessive specialization and the encyclopedic aspirations that characterize two parallel, opposite, and supposedly obsolete trends of the literature in architectural history, the authors dare a radical reformulation of the narrative codes of this discipline, clearly demonstrating the tremendous difficulties implicit in such a monumental and ambitious enterprise.