MODERNISM IN ARCHITECTURE AND ITS AFTERMATH

SmartArt Conference Proceedings, 2022

This paper argues that the roots of present-day economic and cultural globalisation could be recognised in 20 th century modern architecture, which incorporated thoughts and forms from the Buddhist civilisation, Muslim-Arab World, Jewish/Judaic thought and experience, Black African and Pre-Columbian American cultures, and implemented them along its own Greco-Christian traditions.1 It also argues that, while modernism presented itself as the epitome of western rationalism of the Enlightenment tradition, it actually also relied on other civilisations, including their metaphysics, and thus cannot be fully considered rational. This critique argues that two most striking innovations of architectural modernism, the introduction of the flat and undecorated façade surfaces, i.e. the avoidance of the traditional façade-discourse (decoration), and the promotion of architectural space vis-à-vis building material, are related mainly to non-Western religions and to modern physics. The author is aware of the dangers that such a comprehensive subject elaborated in a relatively short paper poses, but he is willing to take the risks in order to get insight into the intercultural exchange between the West and the rest of the world in 20th century architecture.

Architecture is the most public and political of the arts, one generally encountered in a mood of digression and complicit in social control. It could even be argued that the success of the city may have less to do with its aesthetic accomplishments and more to do with the countless emergent factors taking place in such an interface as the street: thus one learns to see buildings as good when they make possible the good lives of their users, as if ethics and aesthetics have a common root. The following article traces different current approaches to avant-gardism in architecture, but relating them to the questions of progress and estrangement so central to modernism.

"This book provides a comprehensive historical and theoretical overview of modern architecture in regions outside the “West” — Europe and North America. It brings together contributions from leading scholars in the interdisciplinary fields of architecture history, architecture theory, area studies, sociology and cultural studies. It interrogates Eurocentric views of modern architecture as autonomous and homogeneous and posits a heteronomous and heterogeneous understanding of modern architecture. Drawing from interdisciplinary theories, this book explores the complex relations between modernism, modernity and modernization and their entanglements with colonialism and postcolonialism, nationalism and development, globalization and regionalism. Closely examining the diverse cases of architectural modernisms in China, India, Indonesia, Singapore, Turkey, Brazil and South Africa, this book transcends the geographic division of labour in area studies to offer a broad comparative survey of modernisms beyond the West. It also covers heterogeneous temporalities of modernism today, tracing the continuities and discontinuities between the past and the present, from the proto-modern to the post-modern, from the west to the rest. This book is an essential resource for understanding architectural modernism outside its “western” regions and mindsets. Its in-depth discussion and insights will be invaluable to specialists, academics and graduate students. It is also comprehensive enough to be used as a textbook for undergraduate students, and general enough for practitioners and the curious general reader."

This idea of the universality of modernity in architecture, as in any other field, had to be put into perspective. For all that, the idea of modernity in architecture in the 19th century must be approached on both sides of the Atlantic, in a dialectical manner and aim to bring to light features of modernity, whether specific or not, rather than a monolithic and dogmatically defined modernity. In order to do this, it was necessary to avoid any teleological and linear vision of the idea of modernity between the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 20th century. In this study, it is reasonable to speak of a proto-modernity in architecture and town planning that was born in France at the end of the 18th century, on the eve of the French Revolution and in the wake of the Enlightenment. After 1945, American leadership in the cultural sphere accompanied American hegemony in the economic, political, strategic and other fields. There is a match between the International Style and the triumphant American modernity: the graft has taken hold, inventories have no place as long as there is no questioning of this modernity. The situation changed rapidly and radically with the postmodern context as early as the 1970s. More recently, deconstructivism has emerged in the United States as a movement of refoundation, of questioning the presuppositions of modernity and postmodernity, as a project for resolving the urban chaos resulting from the impasses generated by both modernity and its avatar, postmodernity.

2010

Modernism first emerged in the early twentieth century, and by the 1920s, the prominent figures of the movement -Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe -had established their reputations. However it was not until after the Second World War that it gained mass popularity, after modernist planning was implemented as a solution to the previous failure of architecture and design to meet basic social needs. During the 1930s as much as 15% of the urban populations were living in poverty, and slum clearance was one of the many social problems of this decade.

In Theories and History of Architecture (1968) and in Project and Utopia (1973), the Italian historian Manfredo Tafuri identifies two cuts that establish modernity: 1st Brunelleschi's work in Florence in the 15th century. 2nd In architecture in the Age of Enlightenment and more particularly in the engravings of the Carceri of Piranesi, in which he agrees with Scully's interpretation. Tafuri's Marxist analysis sheds new light on the origins of modernity. Chicago at the end of the 19th century has a value as a testimony to the situation of architecture faced with capitalist urban modernity. Methodologically, however, Tafuri's approach is underpinned by the desire to show the gradual disappearance of architecture as an autonomous instance of intervention in urban space. By privileging the determination of architectural work through economic infrastructures, Tafuri comes to consider architecture as a pure ideological instance whose effectiveness is considerably reduced by the dominant context of new production relationships. Ultimately, it is around the postulate of the erasure of the architectural object in the modern era that a critical study of Tafuri's work can be made: is this trend inevitable? Is architecture condemned to immerse itself in the city in a fragmentary, neutral and reproducible form? What is meant by architecture of the pure sign? Tafuri's Marxist analysis sheds new light on the origins of modernity. Chicago at the end of the 19th century has a value as a testimony to the situation of architecture faced with capitalist urban modernity. Methodologically, however, Tafuri's approach is underpinned by the desire to show the gradual disappearance of architecture as an autonomous instance of intervention in urban space. By privileging the determination of architectural work through economic infrastructures, Tafuri comes to consider architecture as a pure ideological instance whose effectiveness is considerably reduced by the dominant context of new production relationships. Ultimately, it is around the postulate of the erasure of the architectural object in the modern era that a critical study of Tafuri's work can be made: is this trend inevitable? Is architecture condemned to immerse itself in the city in a fragmentary, neutral and reproducible form? What is meant by architecture of the pure sign? Tafuri's Marxist analysis sheds new light on the origins of modernity. Chicago at the end of the 19th century has a value as a testimony to the situation of architecture faced with capitalist urban modernity. Methodologically, however, Tafuri's approach is underpinned by the desire to show the gradual disappearance of architecture as an autonomous instance of intervention in urban space. By privileging the determination of architectural work through economic infrastructures, Tafuri comes to consider architecture as a pure ideological instance whose effectiveness is considerably reduced by the dominant context of new production relationships. Ultimately, it is around the postulate of the erasure of the architectural object in the modern era that a critical study of Tafuri's work can be made: is this trend inevitable? Is architecture condemned to immerse itself in the city in a fragmentary, neutral and reproducible form? What is meant by architecture of the pure sign? Historically, the fascination that America exerted on Europeans from the beginning of the 19th century can be explained by the fact that it is an ideology in itself, embodying the conjunction of the two scenes, that of the future and that of modernity. The current paradox, in the postmodern context, is the American rejection of modernity, as a whole, without an inventory having been made to restore to modernity as the "stage of the future" its archaic American part, which has little to do with European modernity. Thus, revisionist postmodernist historians and architect-theorists of architecture favor eclecticism in restored architecture as a positive value based on attributing commonly recognized meanings to architectural forms. They celebrate the period 1893-1938, which corresponds to the eclipse of modernity in the USA, between the two schools of Chicago, that of Sullivan and that of Mies van der Rohe. Revisionist history not only relativizes the contribution of the Chicago school, but the entire modernist scheme is called into question, starting with the discredit that all modernist historians cast on the Colombian Exhibition of 1893. For Giedion, for example, it appeared to be an aberration of history. According to Stuart Cohen, the architectural neo-classicism that was revived in 1893 was perfectly adapted to the American historical context of the time. In the reactionary rejection of modernity in its entirety by the revisionists, there is an iconoclastic will towards the glories of modernity, like Gropius but especially Mies van der Rohe.In conclusion, the idea of modernity appeared to some historians and theorists as an ideological one.

Conference Proceedings The 4th International Conference S.ARCH 2017, 2017

This paper proposes a methodology of analysis of contemporary architecture that deconstructs it in seven major trends based on variables that architects undertake when developing a project. This deconstruction of different practices derives in a mapping of contemporary architecture in which buildings can be classified within a specific trend. This methodology is intended to replace a classification of architecture according to scales, location or use with a mapping that emphasizes design processes and intentions. The development of this mapping of contemporary architecture is based on the identification of variables that determine our practice [figure 1]. The design process is understood as an exercise of equalization in which these variables are raised over each other depending on the particular interests of the designer or the character of the commission This equalization allows classification of buildings by affinity with others even if they are unrelated in terms of use, scale or location; but because they share deeper aspects associated with the design methodology behind. In light of the seven variables seen in figure 1, the following seven trends arise [figure 2]: Rationally Rigorous Architecture [1] that privileges technical premises and rational thought; Expressively Organic Architecture [2] that prioritizes an individual and phenomenological approach towards space, materiality and site; Socio-Economically Resourceful Architecture [3] that works with contingency and under social and economical restraints; Objectified Architecture [4] that strongly focuses on formal and esthetic explorations; Symbolic architecture [5] that prioritizes the spatialization of concepts; Regionally Characterized Architecture [6], that shows a special rapport with vernacular building traditions and eco-sustainability; and Nondescript Establishment Architecture [7] that privileges commercial premises. While there are complex cases that can be ascribed to more than one tendency or intention, this paper will present research conducted over three years in a course entitled: “Contemporary Architecture Criticism” [figures 3,4], with architectures designed between 2000 and 2016, in order to demonstrate the relevance and effectiveness of the deconstructive method in teaching contexts, and in the analysis and dissemination of contemporary architecture.

2023

The rise of modern architecture led to a big change in Western and global architectural history. Instead of sticking to old ways, architects focused on new ideas and progress. They wanted to use science in their designs, which created a style of architecture that was used all over the world and based on logic and efficient materials. This kind of architecture is known for being useful and simple, without a lot of decorations. It changed over time, from making cities more friendly to people to connecting with local cultures. Later, postmodern architecture came about as a reaction to the limits of modernism. It wanted to make designs with more meaning, cultural identity, and history. Postmodern architecture is creative and diverse, not the same all the time. It cares about people and how they communicate. It looks different too, with curved lines and decorations. Modern and postmodern architectures are both special and unique. They show different styles and ideas because of when and why they were made.