Architecture for people experiencing poverty was not merely a by-product or an afterthought of development economics in the modern period. In Modernism’s Magic Hat, Ijlal Muzaffar demonstrates the diverse ways in which the architectural experts of neocolonialism historically conceptualized the “development” of the global South while revealing a significant debt to the logic and condition of architecture itself. Muzaffar’s argument highlights how the materiality, aesthetics, temporality, and viscerality of architecture and construction were not backdrops but rather sites that generated development discourse. The author’s aim is to counter the ideas of those who view architecture primarily as a symbol of power, often relegating its effects to passive power dynamics occurring “elsewhere.”
The book delves beneath the surface of scientific optimism about progress, showing that modernism was underpinned by a self-generated myth that the decolonized world could miraculously conjure development without any foundational capital. This phenomenon is described as magic,...
University of California Press