Times of Creative Destruction is about the years that followed the end of WWII, one of the most seminal and dramatic epochs in human history, during which extraordinary star-buildings were born, cities exploded, and an unprecedented world of a 'Third Ecology' emerged. Never before was there such a flurry of daring mega-constructions, such daring spatial acrobatics, 'star' buildings by star architects attained by star developers, mega-constructions, technological feats, and flourishing spatial acrobatics. But, for all its exhilarating creativity, this was also an era of unanticipated, intractable, irreversible destruction reducing the uniqueness and diversity of cultural, social and ecological peaks and valleys of our world, to a 'desert flatland', environmental inequality and unhappiness.
This book critically discusses and revaluates these contradictory events, bringing together and commenting on a selection of shorter key texts by Tzonis and Lefaivre, the product of a rare research and writing partnership. The texts, published between the early 1960s and the present, are significant as documents that inform about the period. They are also important and timely because of their critical and influential role in the debates of this era, both creative and destructive.
About the Author: Alexander Tzonis is professor emeritus at the University of Technology Delft. He was educated at Yale University and taught at Harvard University between 1967 and 1981, at the College de France and Tsinghua University. Among his publications, The Shape of Community (Penguin, 1972) with Serge Chermayeff, Towards a Non-oppressive Environment, (1972).
Liane Lefaivre is Professor Ordinaria (retired) at the University of Applied Art in Vienna. Among her books are Leon Battista Alberti's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (MIT Press, 1996) and The Child, the City and Power of Play (Tsinghua University, Beijing, 2010).
Among the books Lefaivre and Tzonis authored together are Classical Architecture (1986), Emergence of Modern Architecture (Routledge 2004), and Architecture of Regionalism in the Age of Globalization, Peaks and Valleys in the Flat World, (Routledge, 2011).
