The modernist architecture that swept the world in the first half of the twentieth century was praised by its advocates and attacked by its critics for its rationalist and functionalist character, grounded on the dictates of the engineer and the technologist. Modernism and the Spirit of the City challenges this simple reading, and investigates the complex cultural, social, and religious imperatives that lay below the smooth, white surfaces of the new architecture. Over a historical span that runs from the 1890s to the 1950s, ten distinguished scholars address those issues of aesthetics, poetics, spirituality, national identity, and commerce that were interwoven in the search for the ultimate goal of modernist architecture and urban design: paradise on earth. The first section of the book is devoted to strategies employed to define the "spirit" of the city; the second considers the architectural intervention in the city and its aesthetic resonance; the third the role of architecture and urban design as a site of spiritual speculation and reassurance in a robustly agnostic age. This selection of groundbreaking essays offers a significant and long overdue reassessment of the aims and intentions of European architecture and urbanism in the early twentieth century. On the basis of British, French, and German examples, it argues that myth, history and spirituality on one hand, and instrumental reason, order and functionalism on the other need not be understood as mutually hostile, but as essential complements to each other. Iain Boyd Whyte, Volker M. Welter, David Frisby, Helge David, Helen Shiner, Karen Lang, Dagmar Motycka Weston, Rhodri Windsor Liscombe, Rob Stone and Rudolf Schwarz.