Dirty Realism, Now and Then

Since Leon Battista Alberti and the Renaissance architects have been busy churning out ideal, visionary urban plans. This tendency reached a paroxism in the prewar period with CIAM, Le Corbusier’s „Ville Radieuse“, Hilberseimer’s „Grossstadt“, Cor van Eesteren’s „Functionele Stadt“. The postwar period marked a new phase, with a ground-up approach to the city, concerned with a movement back to reality, the reality of everyday urban life produced by new emergent mass culture, mass consumption and mass production. Two major movements coming out of this period that have tended to be forgotten have returned: what the author has called dirty realism and populism.

Liane Lefaivre
Liane Lefaivre, historian, critic, curator and theoretician of architecture is the Chair of Architectural History and Theory at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. With Alexander Tzonis, she introduced the concept of populism to architecture culture in 1976 in their „In the Name of the people; the Populist Movement in Architecture.” Among her books are: Tropical Architecture; Critical Regionalism in a Globalizing World (London 2002), Critical Regionalism (Munich 2003), Aldo van Eyck, Humanist Rebel (Rotterdam 1999), Aldo van Eyck, the Playgrounds and the City (Amsterdam 2002), The Emergence of Modern Architecture (London 2004).