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BRITISH COMTISM AND MODERNIST DESIGN

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2018

MATTHEW WILSON*
Affiliation:
College of Architecture and Planning, Ball State University E-mail: MRWilson@BSU.edu

Abstract

Scholars of political thought, sociology, and the arts have yet to fully explore the impact of positivism on modernist design theory and practice. This paper offers an intellectual history of the works of three generations of positivist sociologists who built on each other's works. They are Auguste Comte and Richard Congreve, Frederic Harrison and Charles Booth, and Patrick Geddes and Victor Branford. These actors developed different types of sociological survey, established a network of urban interventions, and proposed a series of planning programs and manifestos. It will be argued that their intention was to systematically reconcile international and domestic issues to realize a modern eutopia. Following this analysis, it will be shown that a similar language and practice appeared in the work of a diverse range of such modernist designers as Patrick Abercrombie, Sybella Gurney Branford, Louis Sullivan, H. P. Berlage, and Le Corbusier, among others.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018

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Footnotes

Many thanks to the various reviewers who contributed to this piece, especially those affiliated to this journal and the Utopian Studies Society Europe.

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109 Geddes, City Development, 3, 20, 98, 210.

110 Royal Institute of British Architects, Transactions: Town Planning Conference London, 10–15 October 1910 (London, 1911), 66–71.

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169 Lewis Mumford, Culture of Cities, 351.

170 Mumford, The CIAM Discourse, 238.

171 Edger and Metcalf, Lettres D'Auguste Comte, 13–14; Comte, Correspondance inédite, 327–8; Comte, A General View, 326–86; Geddes, Patrick and Slater, Gilbert, Ideas at War (London, 1917), 221Google Scholar.

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