In 1946, the arts and culture journal Marg was founded under the editorial leadership of writer, arts patron, and cultural critic Mulk Raj Anand (1905–2004). Dedicated to the promotion and analysis of the arts, Marg featured modernist practices and heritage forms from around the world and from a diverse range of periods in illustrative displays, scholarly essays, and editorial content. Multiple discourses were brought into conversation with each other through a type of visual pedagogy. From architectural modernism to art history to practices in picture framing, it interpreted and taught a new modernist historical arc of arts in a decolonizing India. Connected to the newly expanding movements of literary and artistic cultures of the post-war era, and what Justin Quinn has termed “new cultural conversations,” the periodical straddles genre, form, and purposive frame. Marg sits adjacent to the Indian phenomenon of magazine literary activism and its mid-century project of nation building, and it echoes the ambitions of modernist architectural publications. Yet, not far afield of the relatively new genre of the “timepass” magazine (which burgeoned in mid-century India), Marg speaks to the formation of English-language periodical platforms appealing to a new bourgeois public in India. Established in advance of nationalized institutions for the modern arts, it promised a prime new platform for education and idea exchange. Furthermore, its journal format could reach far flung readerships and audiences. Annapurna Garimella observed, on Marg’s unique role in arts and cultural education promotion, “Early Marg volumes are remarkable for their interventionary voice. Various issues nimbly jump from the discussion of arts education policy to the future of urban planning to the history of Orissa architecture to contemporary American glass.”

What architectural and spatial shape should a socialist society take? This was a question of heated debate in post-revolutionary Russia, all the more so in the late 1920s and early 1930s, once the survival of the Bolshevik state seemed assured and the focus could turn to constructing its infrastructures. This essay examines one short-lived but significant episode in the history of Soviet architecture and urban planning: the disurbanist philosophy of “new resettlement,” formulated in 1929 by the...

How might we situate Paul Scheerbart within German modernism? The work of excavating his oeuvre, its conceptual and generic contours, and its entanglements with other figures and constellations of German modernism has begun in earnest, yet he is still known primarily as a theorist of glass architecture, on the one hand, and as a decades-long, subterranean influence on Walter Benjamin, on the other—Benjamin received a copy of Scheerbart’s 1913 novel Lesabéndio from Gershom Scholem as a wedding present, and continually returned to the utopian aspects of Scheerbart’s writing. In his 1914 treatise, Glasarchitektur (“Glass Architecture”), Scheerbart calls for nothing less than the total spiritual renewal of humankind by means of building with colored glass, an avant-garde architectural utopianism that would influence Bruno Taut, as well as artists associated with Bauhaus and Dada. “Glass Architecture” was published in Herwarth Walden’s Expressionist journal Der Sturm, and Scheerbart associated with the artists in the orbit of Der Sturm, a prominent modernist constellation in Berlin that included figures such as Walden, Else Lasker-Schüler, Alfred Döblin, and others. Yet despite these associations, and despite the multimedial sweep of Scheerbart’s work—which includes dozens of novels, as well as the treatise on glass and a 1910 account of his attempt to build a perpetual motion machine—Scheerbart’s contributions to German modernism still await a fuller reckoning. In part this is surely because the books themselves, idiosyncratic, whimsical, and always of uncertain genre, at times seem written to defy the attempt to take them seriously: Scheerbart’s narrative worlds are outlandish and weightless, while his style exhibits none of the density, difficulty, or self-awareness typically associated with literary modernism. As Benjamin wrote in praise, Scheerbart’s prose is transparent, fresh as “a nursling’s cheeks.” Yet this transparency associated with both Scheerbart’s prose and his architectural fantasies about glass exhibits multiple ambiguities—ambiguities that prove quite generative for thinking about some of the discursive, disciplinary, and medial contours of German modernism, especially its engagement with questions of perception and embodiment, its relationship to monism, its retheorization of the subject, and its interrogation of the relationship between art and society. This essay reads Scheerbart’s 1913 “Asteroïdenroman” (“asteroid-novel”) Lesabéndio, to flesh out the relationship between this ambiguous transparency, on the one hand, and the novel’s utopian vision of boundlessly mobile, embodied perception, on the other. By unfolding a tension between fantasies of transparency and embodied vision, the novel engages with a key problematic of the avant-garde, yet closer examination suggests the presence of another context, namely the popular intellectual currents that circulated under the names of monism and panpsychism. Indeed, the strange, alien bodies in this novel might be seen as a missing link between modernism and monism. The ambiguous transparency of both glass and monism pivoted on the paradoxical relationships between materiality, embodiment, and perception, as a new, specific inflection of the relationship between mind ( Geist) and body. In the ways in which glass in architectural discourse around 1913 flickered in and out of different modes of signification—is it transparent or is it a surface? Does it allow us to see clearly or is it what is meant to be seen? Is it material, medium, metaphor, or all three?—these questions reflect monism’s revision of the relationship between matter and spirit. Far from representing a reactionary flight into mysticism, the monist fancy that characterizes Lesabéndio ought to be seen as a playful literalization of contemporary ambiguities surrounding transparency, embodiment, perception, and materiality.

In the near-century since the publication of The Bridge (1930), Hart Crane has been widely recognized as the poet of urban modernity, or, in his own words, as a “suitable Pindar for the dawn of the machine age.” He has been acclaimed as celebrant and critic, by turn, of America’s myth of itself and as a pioneer cartographer of the queer spaces of the modern metropolis. Paradoxically, perhaps, it is his rendering of the late nineteenth-century Brooklyn Bridge (designed by John Roebling, started in 1869 and opened in 1883), which has been taken as central to his vision of early twentieth-century America’s tensile complexity. I don’t demur from this position; but I do argue that for Crane it was not only the Bridge as manifestation in stone and steel of his nation’s past, present and future, that mattered. As important were the larger technologies, practices, and discourses of architecture which produced the Bridge, determined his experience of it, and shaped his understanding of its significance. Another way of putting this is to say that the Bridge (and The Bridge) are necessary, but not entirely sufficient, components of Crane’s construction of modernity and that to understand his emerging vision of America, we need to look to his larger engagement with contemporary architecture in all of its variety and potency. The purpose of this article, then, is to bring Crane’s architectural interests to the fore, to address the specificity of architectural allusion in his poetry, and to move beyond an assessment of the Bridge’s symbolic value and towards a more granular reading of the way architecture functions across his oeuvre, of the forms it takes, and the meanings it assumes. It goes without saying that poetry provides Crane with a medium in which to discuss architecture. More importantly, architecture provides him with a way of thinking and speaking about poetry. First in early poems from White Buildings (1926) and subsequently in The Bridge, he engages in an assessment of architectural effect while also testing the capacity of poetry to deliver such an account. So, while The Bridge is a poem about the Brooklyn Bridge, it is also a poem about poetry.

“The task of a museum,” wrote Italian critic and curator Pietro Maria Bardi in 1951, “should be to make resound, to interpret with perspicacity and appropriate technique, those monuments that sing: thus will be avoided the risk of useless sentimentalities, dangerous neutralities, hybrid educations, and eclecticism.” Bardi’s proclamation was rooted in a line from Paul Valéry’s “Eupalinos, or the Architect” (1921), a Socratic dialogue in which the ancient Greek architect Eupalinos is said to have distinguished three types of buildings: those that sing, because they are created by master architects; those functional but unremarkable buildings that merely speak; and mute structures, so lacking in aesthetic vigor that they are inferior even to the amusing “accidental order” found in heaps of rubble “vomited” by the wagons of contractors. In his previous life, as a curator and architectural critic with links to the government of Benito Mussolini, Bardi might have deployed Valéry's dialogue to support the sweeping architectural refashioning of Italian cities by radical young architects, as the master builders of fascism's new social and political order. But by 1951, Bardi’s vision had narrowed. The fascist regime had fallen, and Bardi had emigrated from Italy to Brazil, where he found work as the director of a newly-founded art museum. Rather than advocating the creation of public works whose grandness would defy Neptune himself, Bardi arranged paintings. Even so, he retained the heroic rhetoric he had developed in fascist Italy, calling upon the museum to make its monuments sing. In postwar Italy, Bardi had seen that any future work would likely be circumscribed by the shadow of his activities during the recently-deposed fascist regime. Thus in 1946 he and his wife, architect Lina Bo Bardi, left Italy for Brazil. Almost immediately, the two were drawn into the orbit of media magnate Assis Chateaubriand, who enlisted the couple to work as director and architect, respectively, for his new art museum, the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) (fig. 1). Beginning with the opening of MASP in 1947, the Bardis used innovative exhibition designs as a way to spur the museum's involvement in social life beyond the space of the gallery. Best known are MASP's “crystal easels,” freestanding sheets of glass on which paintings were mounted throughout a large expanse of open gallery space (fig. 2). These crystal easels were first installed at MASP in the late 1960s, and they have long been understood as an antiteleological mode of display that disrupted canonical art histories, thus democratizing art viewing. But already in the late 1940s, two decades prior to the crystal easels, the Bardis’ exhibition practices began pushing the sensibility of the Brazilian art world from the salão (salon) of aristocratic or bourgeois sociability to the public museum sala (hall). With installations of artworks on industrial metal structures rather than within beaux-arts interiors, classes and pedagogical displays that mixed original artworks and reproductions, and the presence of contemporary design and commercial culture in the gallery, the Bardis sought to expand the range of social classes welcome at the museum.