Jaimini Mehta is a practicing architect and the Honorary Director of the Center for the Study of Urbanism and Architecture in Vadodara, India. His previous books include Louis I. Kahn: Architect (1975, co-authored with Romaldo Giurgola), Rethinking Troodos: Post-Rational Architecture (2011), and Embodied Vision: Interpreting the Architecture of Fatehpur Sikri (2014).

Jaimini Mehta’s collection of essays is a must-read for those who believe architecture, as both a material and intellectual construct, is a metropolis of ideas—diverse, complex, challenging, rewarding, and important. Each thought-provoking essay is a critical rumination on the global nature of modernism, its possibilities, foibles, and its implications for culture as ways of living. Professor Mehta accepts the value of modernity but argues cogently and convincingly throughout for a rethinking of the foundations upon which it was built. David Bell, Associate Professor, School of Architecture, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Written over four decades, Critiquing the Modern in Architecture is a collection of essays exploring the ideological and metaphysical core of modern architecture. Author Jaimini Mehta moves architectural modernism beyond its primarily Eurocentric definition, interrogating the subject from the perspective of a non-Western thought-world. Mehta groups his essays under three key themes: “Modernity,” which explores the ideological underpinnings of the modernity–modernism binary; “The Idea of Architecture,” which examines issues that constitute the timeless and invariable aspects of architecture against which the prevalent modernist discourse can be critically evaluated; and “On Praxis,” which analyzes the works of three contemporary architects and the Vienna Secessionist movement (1890–1918) to articulate a critique of the foundations of the modern movement. Providing a new view of the modern in architecture, this book is essential reading for architectural theorists and scholars of modernism.