The 8th Savannah Symposium features papers investigating modernity and/or modernities in the broadest and most critical terms. Studies address architecture, landscape and the imagined environment as well as empirical, methodological and theoretical approaches. The significance of the split-level house in mid-20th-century suburbanization is discussed as are postcolonial reinterpretations of world architecture. There are papers that investigate attempts to assert modernity, as suggested by the origins of the very word "modern" deriving from the Latin modernus from modo, "just now," (marking a 5th-century desire to distinguish the Christian era from the Pagan era) as well as discussions of cultural hybridity where modernity is actively negotiated. Some studies focus on particular sites or examples of modern architecture while others interpret who determined the modernity, when and where it occurred, and how it was presented and promoted.
