Modernity. Modernization. Modernism. Terms and concepts much discussed and sometimes contested in architecture. How do we recognize modernity? What does modernization entail? What is a modernist philosophy, and is it still relevant now? While many identify the beginning of modernism with the industrial revolution, philosopher Marshall Berman argued that humans have been grappling with the “maelstrom” of modernity “for close to five hundred years.”1 Linked with our understanding and “experience of space and time,” modernity informs the philosophies of those who encounter it. As the industrial revolution reached a fever pitch in the decades leading up to World War I, more definitive philosophies of Modernism were articulated. These positions are relevant today not only in their relationship with the form of the material environment we inherit from the twentieth century, but the insights revealed by human beings confronting a confounding and conflicting moment in time as creators in a radically changing world.
We find the origin of the word modern in the Latin modo, meaning just now. It is curious to note, given this explicit focus on the present time in the definition of modern, that the first spring-driven clocks began to appear in the late 1400s and early 1500s, coinciding with the beginning of this “experience of space and time,” that Berman refers to as modernity. It is evident that the experience of modernity is well rooted in our perception of time: the firm establishment of now, dividing the past and present. It is fitting then that the modern era, preoccupied as we are with instruments and technology, might begin with a major refinement to the mechanized measurement of time. Also telling is the coincidence of the beginning of European colonization of the Americas with the supposed beginning of modernity. Just as Western civilization began to define its own time with precision, it was also confronted with the existence of previously unknown peoples with their own concepts of time and space. It is telling that Europeans would refer to the indigenous peoples of the Americas as primitive, as if they belonged to the past, inhabitants of a different time apart from their own.
Just after World War II, the poet W.H. Auden identified the experience of modernity similarly, with an experience of time in which society is constantly advancing toward another period, by nature one fundamentally different than the present and substantially altered by technological advancement:
Until the Industrial Revolution, the way in which men lived changed so slowly that any man, thinking of his great-grandchildren, could imagine them as people living the same kind of life with the same kind of needs and satisfactions as himself. Technology, with its ever-accelerating transformation of man’s way of living, has made it impossible for us to imagine what life will be like even twenty years from now.2
This is perhaps the root of the dissociation that humans feel in the modern world. Since we began to more clearly mark and measure where and when we are, it has highlighted our separation from what was and what will be. It is this state of perpetual change in relationships in both space and time that Marx identified with the “bourgeois epoch.”
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and relations with his kind.3
The sense that all the world around us is perpetually changing, an awareness of the ephemerality of time and space, these have become defining characteristics of modernity. The ever accelerating changes in material conditions around us provide a metric by which we may measure the passage of time. The Italian Futurist Antonio Sant’Elia noted, “The tremendous antithesis between the modern and the ancient world is the outcome of all those things that exist now and did not exist then.”4 This perceptual shift, our inhabitation of the now, distinguishing the material reality of one's existence with that of those before and after, took place perhaps slowly at first, but the industrial revolution and the subsequent rise of the metropolis radically accelerated these changes. Industrialism in the city gave rise to the perception of an increasing physical alienation that greatly influenced the architecture of the early twentieth century, a period that is commonly associated with what we call Modernism. It is typified by a conscious effort to address the conditions and contradictions of our modern experiences. Walter Gropius, reflecting on the urban fabric of the early twentieth century, exclaimed:
We walk through our streets and our cities and do not howl with shame at such deserts of ugliness! Let us be quite clear: these grey, hollow, spiritless mock-ups, in which we live and work, will be shameful evidence for posterity of the spiritual descent into hell of our generation, which forgot that great, unique art: architecture.5
Facing “perceptual disintegration and renewal, […] struggle and contradiction, […] ambiguity, and anguish,”6 many architects of the early twentieth century sought to radically restructure the physical distribution of the city. They associated the malaise of modern experience with the antiquated physical forms of the city and the metropolis, the embodiment of industrial capitalism’s “extraction of surplus value.”7 Facing the seeming disintegration of what Ferdinand Tönnies called the Gemeinshaft, or community, and the subsequent rise of the Gesellshaft, or society, they set about searching for the ideal forms of a future world dominated by industry and machinery. Hurtling along toward this ever-changing future, many embraced ideologies which heralded “the light, the practical, the ephemeral and the swift.”8 They aimed to harness the logic of the machine in the orchestration of a new world, ushering in a bright future full of possibility for the masses. It seems somewhat contradictory that, lamenting the “anguish of metropolitan alienation,”9 itself a result of the processes of industrialization and modernization, many architects embraced the machine, industrial products and processes, and the relatively new materials of glass and steel, prompting even more rapid and dramatic changes to the material conditions of the city.
While architects in Europe were substantially more explicit in identifying the socialist ideologies they aimed to advance, American architects struggled with many of the same concerns of a rapidly industrialized world. Crowded, dirty cities full of poverty and disease were emblematic of the industrial metropolis at the dawn of the twentieth century. Almost ten years before Corbusier would write of the “workers in society today [who] no longer have dwellings adapted to their needs,”10 Frank Lloyd Wright proposed an architecture which made “a human dwelling-place […] in itself expressive and beautiful, intimately related to modern life and fit to live in.”11 Desires for a progressive, egalitarian mode of life were hallmarks of a generation of architects whose material and technological repertoire was unlike anything available to their predecessors, and whose professional careers were punctuated by the destruction of two world wars. Though Wright envisioned a radical shift in the physical environments in which we live, there was little socialized state support for workers housing and building projects as in Europe of the 1920s and 30s. It wouldn’t be until mid-century that the United States would see a more pronounced focus on housing in the form of suburbanized tract construction.
Wright’s modernism, though similarly concerned with the material conditions of life in the industrial era, takes on a particularly American character. It appears to emerge from, and actively contribute to, that peculiar American mythology that valorizes the individual, framed against the backdrop of a rugged, dangerous, and suspiciously empty wilderness. It is worth noting that during Wright’s tenure with Sullivan in Chicago, while Burnham and Root were building the tallest brick building in history, the US Army was still working to eradicate native peoples on the Plains.12 Wright’s romantic vision of a decentralized rural utopia, “based squarely and fairly on the ground,”13 presupposes the empty Plains, the freshly whitewashed American frontier. His “domestic rural romanticism,” his “anguished revolt against the ‘inhuman metropolis’ dominated by the money economy,” finds its site on the open landscape of the Midwest, recently cleared of its previous ruralized and decentralized inhabitants by the very industrial capitalist powers driving “the great metropolis” he is supposed to abhor.14
Like his contemporaries, Wright hypothesized about the ability of “the machine,” in this case the automobile, to radically change the way we live. He saw it as a means to disperse the industry of the city into the countryside and create “the general non-urban development.”15 Waxing poetic, he claimed that “Ruralism as distinguished from urbanism is American, and truly democratic.”16 Less than ten years after Wright’s musing on the potential of these machines to usher in a new era of country living and democracy, it was these machines carrying the Nazi army across Europe, the Japanese bombers over Pearl Harbor, the atomic bomb over Japan. Modernity is so often defined by its contradictions, particularly where the promises of technology are concerned. Auden again offered some insight in the shadow of an atomic world.
The advent of the machine has destroyed the direct relation between a man’s intention and his deed. If St. George meets the dragon face to face and plunges a spear into its heart, he may legitimately say “I slew the dragon,” but, if he drops a bomb on the dragon from an altitude of twenty thousand feet, though his intention – to slay it – is the same, his act consists in pressing a lever and it is the bomb, not St. George, that does the killing. […] It is extremely difficult today to use public figures as themes for poetry because the good or evil they do depends less upon their characters and intentions than upon the quantity of impersonal force at their disposal.17
While Wright’s intentions pointed toward the rural Jeffersonian dream of a decentralized and democratic America, the reality of the dispersion and construction of suburban developments was still rooted in the broader logic of the machine and industrialism, reliant on the city as a locus of material, labor, energy and knowledge. We see this in the suburban developments which proliferated in the postwar years, embodying not so much Wright’s disintegration of the city, but the integration of the countryside into the city and vice versa, connected by the infrastructure of the machine: tendrils of concrete, macadam and copper wires tracing their way back to the central metropolis where massive ports and refineries churned out the fuel of suburbanization. Anyone who has experienced the daily routine of automotive commute typical of suburban America can tell you that the machine has evolved new forms of alienation.
As for Wright’s claims of ruralism as “truly democratic,” this seems perhaps a more difficult claim to evaluate, particularly given that the semi-regional autonomy he envisioned, complete with all of the industry and amenities of the city distributed through the countryside, never fully made the transition to the realities of suburban development. Tafuri called such antiurban projects of modernism, “only nostalgia, the rejections of the highest levels of capitalist organization, the desire to regress to the infancy of humanity.”18 Perhaps this over-simplifies Wright’s thought, but perhaps Wright’s approach to the issues of the city in the early twentieth century were equally simplified, attempting to negate the overwhelming industrialization and urbanization of an era with a pastiche of a mythic rural America. While Wright attempted to accommodate all of the functional elements of the city in his plans for Broadacre, there is little attention to the political implications of such moves, beyond some nebulous claim of “democracy.” What does it mean for a democracy when its citizens are decentralized? What are the politics of a place where public congregation is not the byproduct of centralization and of the overlap of various peoples and functions within the same space, but is structured through careful spatial and programmatic planning? This group goes to school here, this group goes to the ball game there, this group goes shopping and this group goes to work, and if they’re lucky, they’ll make eye contact driving between the parking lots of their respective buildings and their driveways. Sociologist Richard Sennett identifies such a tendency to commercialize our approach to “the public” in modern cities.
The meaning of the word “public” has been pretty debased. Most practical use of the terms “public” and “public spaces” in cities connotes spaces where people go to buy things. We think about shopping malls, downtowns, and so on, in terms of consumptions, pleasure. What’s missing is any sense of the Greek notion of polis, which is that there’s something more consequent, more political, about different people being concentrated together in the same place. […] To have a meaningful city center, something has to happen there politically.19
Wright disintegrated the very notion of center, dispersing the public spaces of consumption along the periphery of his Broadacre City plan. Not only are the public spaces commercialized and differentiated according to specific functions, but the denser adjacencies which create happenstance and random interaction are scattered, if not altogether removed, leaving little room for the political engagement that Sennett puts at the middle of the “public.”
[…] We don’t know how to make this work in the modern world. We have two reflex actions, which are each self-defeating. One is to simulate past models of what “public” looks like, and the other is, oddly enough, to privatize the public realm. […] We copy morphologies, but we could never go back and copy the political and social circumstances that gave birth to them. In other words, it’s Disney World as a public space. […] It’s a place where nothing painful happens, a place that completely depoliticizes your experience of all you see.20
Not only were the rural developments of Wright’s ambitions still reliant on the logic of an industrialized urban society, they can be seen as more effectively depoliticizing the landscape than democratizing it. While Broadacre City may have adhered to its own internal logic based on an idealized individual autonomy, the distribution of the banal activities of economy and sustenance disintegrates both the urban center and its subsequent sociopolitical agencies as the region largely still relies on the metropolis as the engine of its economic growth.
In the 1970s Henri Lefebvre suggested that space is political, complicating the legacy of early twentieth century modernists’ quest for the hyper rational and functionalist logic of the machine for living. Lefebvre states:
Space is not a scientific object removed from ideology or politics; it has always been political and strategic. If space has an air of neutrality and indifference with regard to its contents and thus seems to be ‘purely’ formal, the epitome of rational abstraction, it is precisely because it has already been occupied and used, and has already been the focus of past processes whose traces are not always evident in the landscape. Space has been shaped and molded from historical and natural elements, but this has been a political process. Space is political and ideological.21
While the designs and manifestoes of the early twentieth century Modernists, European and American alike, certainly reflected political ideologies, their promotion of formal and material strategies as solutions to the ailments of industrial society did little to expose or reform the power structures which had given rise to them. Although the creation of space is a political act, the alteration of space will not alter political realities in a 1:1 relationship, nor will changes conform to the assumed projections of its designers.
In the early twenty-first century, we find ourselves in many ways confronting similar issues as our Modernist forebears. These challenges “[promise] adventure, power, joy, growth, transformations of ourselves and the world - and, at the same time, […threaten] to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.”22 We face rapid urbanization and technological change, growing inequality, displacement of populations, a changing climate, and degrading ecosystems. Invariably these are both political problems and architectural problems. It is important to recognize however that localized architectural solutions to physical symptoms may do little to address underlying political disparities. In some cases they may exacerbate them. As practitioners in a constantly changing world, a modern world, it is important that we understand our condition as humans, here and now, on Earth. It is also important that we understand the limitations of the impacts we may have as architects. Undoubtedly we may make great contributions as architects to the well-being of our planet. Other contributions we must make as citizens, peers, comrades.
A society which was really like a good poem, embodying the aesthetic virtues of beauty, order, economy and subordination of detail to the whole, would be a nightmare of horror for, given the historical reality of actual men, such a society could only come into being through selective breeding, extermination of the physically and mentally unfit, absolute obedience to its Director, and a large slave class kept out of sight in cellars.
Vice versa, a poem which was really like a political democracy – examples, unfortunately, exist – would be formless, windy, banal and utterly boring.23
List of Figures:
Figure 1:
Lewins, Dean. “The Rocinha favela near Ipanema Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Aug 3. 2016.” <http://media1.s-nbcnews.com/j/newscms/2016_31/1652261/favela-rio-ejo-080316_6b63131061ea99e6f915a05c7fb159c7.nbcnews-fp-1200-800.jpg>
Bilinsky, Boris. Metropolis poster. 1927. from Scott Gartner, “Metropolis Lecture.” 2020.
Figure 2:
Hilberseimer, Ludwig Karl. 1924. Project for a Highrise City. <https://library-artstor-org.ezproxy.lib.vt.edu/asset/AWSS35953_35953_29413392>
Duce, Albert. Western part of the abandoned Packard Automotive Plant in Detroit, Michigan. October, 25, 2009. <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abandoned_Packard_Automobile_Factory_Detroit_200.jpg>
Figure 3:
Burnham and Root. 1889-91. Chicago: Monadnock Building: general view, Monadnock Building. <https://library.artstor.org/asset/ARTSTOR_103_41822000051563>
Grabill. 1890. View of Wounded Knee Battlefield, Chief Big Foot's Body Under Covering in Foreground, Glass Negatives of Indians (Collected by the Bureau of American Ethnology) (1850s-1930s). Photographs. Place: National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. <https://library.artstor.org/asset/NMNH_125721590>
Figure 4:
Burt Glinn. 1957. USA. New York. Levittown Housing. USA. Levittown, New York. 1957. Arial view.. <https://library.artstor.org/asset/AMAGNUMIG_10311524665>
Collins, Marjory, photographer. Baltimore, Maryland. Traffic jam as workers of the first shift leave the Belthlehem Fairfield shipyards in cars and trolleys on the road to Baltimore. Baltimore Baltimore. Maryland United States, 1943. Apr. Photograph. <https://www.loc.gov/item/2017850082/>
Figure 5:
Wright, Frank Lloyd. 1934-1958. Broadacre City Project. <https://library.artstor.org/asset/AWSS35953_35953_34611796>
Bibliography:
Auden, W.H. “The Poet and the City.” The Dyers Hand and Other Essays. London, UK: Faber and Faber, 1948.
Berman, Marshal. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1982.
Gropius, Walter. “Gropius/Taut/Behne: New ideas on architecture” In Programs and manifestoes on 20th century architecture, edited by Ulrich Conrads, translated by Michael Bullock, 46-48. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1971
Kaminer, Tahl. Architecture, Crisis and Resuscitation: The reproduction of post-Fordism in late-twentieth-century architecture. New York, NY: Routledge, 2011.
Le Corbusier. “Le Corbusier: Towards a new architecture: guiding principles” In Programs and manifestoes on 20th century architecture, edited by Ulrich Conrads, translated by Michael Bullock, 59-62. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1971
Lefebvre, Henri. “Reflections on the Politics of Space.” Translated by Michael J. Enders. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography. 8, no. 2. May 1976. 30-37.
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. New York, NY: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1955.
Sant’Elia, Antonio. “Antonio Sant’Elia / Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: Futurist architecture” In Programs and manifestoes on 20th century architecture, edited by Ulrich Conrads, translated by Michael Bullock, 34-38. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1971
Sennett, Richard. “The Civitas of Seeing.” Places. 5, no. 4. 82-84
Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. Translated by Barbara Luigia La Penta. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1976.
Wiseman, Carter. Twentieth-Century American Architecture: The buildings and their makers. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1998.
Wright, Frank Lloyd. “Frank Lloyd Wright: Organic architecture” In Programs and manifestoes on 20th century architecture, edited by Ulrich Conrads, translated by Michael Bullock, 25. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1971
Wright, Frank Lloyd. The Disappearing City. 1935. Quoted in Scott Gartner Midterm Exam, 2020.
Berman, Marshal. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. Simon and Schuster. New York, 1982. pp 15,16
Auden, W.H. “The Poet and the City.” The Dyers Hand and Other Essays. Faber and Faber. London. 1948. 79
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc. New York. 1955. 13
Sant’Elia, Antonio. “Antonio Sant’Elia / Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: Futurist architecture” In Programs and manifestoes on 20th century architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrads, trans. Michael Bullock (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1971) 35-36.
Gropius, Walter. “Gropius/Taut/Behne: New ideas on architecture” In Programs and manifestoes on 20th century architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrads, trans. Michael Bullock (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1971) 46
Berman, Marshal. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. Simon and Schuster. New York, 1982. 15
Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. Translated by Barbara Luigia La Penta. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1976. 81
Sant’Elia, Antonio. “Antonio Sant’Elia / Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: Futurist architecture” In Programs and manifestoes on 20th century architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrads, trans. Michael Bullock (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1971) 36.
Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1976) 120
Le Corbusier. “Le Corbusier: Towards a new architecture: guiding principles” In Programs and manifestoes on 20th century architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrads, trans. Michael Bullock (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1971) 62
Wright, Frank Lloyd. “Frank Lloyd Wright: Organic architecture” In Programs and manifestoes on 20th century architecture, ed. by Ulrich Conrads, trans. Michael Bullock (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1971) 25
Wiseman, Carter. Twentieth-Century American Architecture: The buildings and their makers. (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1998) 54
Wright, Frank Lloyd. The Disappearing City. 1935. Quoted in Scott Gartner Midterm Exam, 2020.
Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1976) 122-124
Wright, Frank Lloyd. The Disappearing City. 1935. Quoted in Scott Gartner Midterm Exam, 2020.
Wright, Frank Lloyd. The Disappearing City. 1935. Quoted in Scott Gartner Midterm Exam, 2020.
Auden, W.H. “The Poet and the City.” The Dyers Hand and Other Essays. (Faber and Faber. London. 1948) 80.
Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1976) 124
Sennett, Richard. “The Civitas of Seeing.” Places. 5, no. 4. 82
Sennett, Richard. “The Civitas of Seeing.” Places. 5, no. 4. 82-83
Lefebvre, Henri. “Reflections on the Politics of Space.” trans. Michael J. Enders. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography. 8, no. 2. May 1976. 31
Berman, Marshal. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. Simon and Schuster. New York, 1982. 15
Auden, W.H. “The Poet and the City.” The Dyers Hand and Other Essays. (Faber and Faber. London. 1948) 85.
Wright’s Broadacre City proposal looks eerily like a modern day circuit board. Really awesome read.