OASE92

This issue of OASE starts from the observation that our knowledge of modern architectural approaches remains, to this very day, largely limited to the avant-garde practices of a few grandmasters of the Modern Movement. Their attitudes are, in line with their proper rhetoric, often understood as opposed to tradition, averse to existing codes and unconventional in character. This issue of OASE aims to shed light on a different set of modern architectural approaches that lingered as it were ‘in the shadow’ of their canon- ical peers. Critics such as Kenneth Frampton (the arrière-garde), Colin St John Wilson (the other moderns) and Manuel de Sola- Morales (another modern tradition) have drawn attention to the historical importance of these alternative practices. However, our interest is not in writing an alternative historiography or canonising little-known architects, but rather to illustrate that this other set of architectural practices represents alternative ap- proaches to modernity that offer points of departure from which to rethink contemporary design attitudes.