A Renewed Experimentalism: Exploring Late Modernism

Architectural historian Emily Bills, critic and curator Mimi Zeiger, and author and designer Chris Grimley will lecture as part of MAS Context’s 2021 Spring Talks series.

A Renewed Experimentalism: Exploring Late Modernism

On the occasion of the recent release of the book Wayne Thom: Photographing the Late Modern (The Monacelli Press, 2020), the speakers of this event will focus on the work of photographer Wayne Thom, explore Late Modernism in architecture, and discuss ongoing efforts to record and document movements and figures whose relevant contribution to architecture deserve a closer look.

Wayne Thom: Photographing the Late Modern is the first monograph of Shanghai-born California-based photographer Wayne Thom, whose documentation of Late Modern architecture constitutes an architectural/visual archive unlike any other.

A crucial primer to late-twentieth-century Modernism, this monograph devoted to Wayne Thom chronicles his photographic practice and the architectural and urban environment in which he worked. An innovative chronicler of the booming West Coast urbanism of the 1960s and 70s, Thom’s photographs of key projects by architecture firms such as William Pereira & Associates, Edward Durell Stone, SOM, Gio Ponti, John Portman, I. M. Pei, and A. Quincy Jones helped establish the idea of cool architectural glamour of the era.

As author Emily Bills mentions in her introduction to the book, a new generation of architects were eager to rework the lessons of Midcentury Modernism. “These 'Late Modernist,' as Charles Jenks identified them, tended toward exaggeration, extending Modernism's theoretical percepts in ways that signaled a renewed experimentalism.”