The Change of Ideas and Texts contributing to the Thought and Practice of Architecture in the United States and Western Europe, from the Chicago School to Architect Rem Koolhaas' 1978 book Delirious to New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan

Wars, migrations and population growth changing modes of production and consumption, inventions and art movements of the first half of the twentieth century have profoundly affected our arguments about cities. The article mainly focuses on architectural texts and theories produced with modern and postmodern understandings. This study, which takes the United States of America and Western Europe-centered geography as a sample area, deals with the period from the 1920s to the 1980s. The method of the article is based on qualitative research. This qualitative method used is based on theoretical reading and discussion. Urban sociology terms of the period, philosophy-based ideas and architects' projects constitute the article's research area. The article builds its hypothesis on the narrative of the metropolitan city, from the Chicago School to Rem Koolhaas's book 'Delirious to New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan'. According to the evaluation of the article, urban theories and architectural texts based in the USA and Europe have been shaped under the influence of utopian modernist views, design approaches built on postmodern philosophy, technological developments, globalization and capital-centred planning. The article is helpful in narrating the polyphony and ambiguous ground of the urban theories and architectural texts of the 1920s and 1980s, which have similar socio-economic and political characteristics in the United States and Western Europe.

Keywords

modernism, postmodernism, architectural theory.