Housing and Community Development

The Unfulfilled Promise of Modernism

  • 1.  The Unfulfilled Promise of Modernism

    Posted 06-13-2015 06:55 AM
    This message has been cross posted to the following Discussion Forums: Housing Knowledge Community and Regional and Urban Design Committee .
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    The Unfulfilled Promise of Modernism 



    As Anthony Denzer describes the Bauhaus in his paper "Masters of Modernism"- "The Bauhaus revolutionized art training by combining the teaching of the pure arts with the study of crafts. Gropius aimed to unite art with technology, and he educated a new generation of designers and architects to reject historical precedents and adopt the ideology of modern industry. The Bauhaus, faculty consisted of an extraordinary group that included Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer." 

    Corbusier, La Ville Radieuse
    Bleak windswept plazas, overwhelming brutalist concrete boxes, glass boxes, public housing misery, the car fixated city, urban freeways, separation of uses and Euclidian zoning, soulless high-rises - there is hardly any ailment that plagues our cities that isn't laid on the doorstep of modernism. Quite different from sentiments in Europe, there is little love for modernism in the US.

    True, one can travel through many cities, here and abroad and find plenty of examples for any or all of the above perceptions and notions and one can find in each case some plausible linkage to writings of architects, planners and others who considered themselves modernists that corroborate the damning verdict about modernism as the cause of much we don't like about our cities. Corbusier's proposal for La Ville Radieuse and especially his Plan Voisan Pour Paris have become infamous examples of urban renewal or soulless new towns which are exemplified by Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City dreams and considered the original recipes for suburban sprawl. 

    Case closed? Not so fast! This essay will show that this quick critique of modernism is mostly formal, is historically incorrect and leaves out the context in which modernists operated and what they wanted to achieve. A more careful look will reveal that modernism was not really an architectural style but a social movement in response to social and cultural upheaval and an attempt to develop an architecture and a city that responded to conditions neither buildings nor cities had to respond to before. As upheaval and "disruption" continues today, modernism is still relevant in a surprising way.

    Today, we not only continue to live in an area of rapid change with cities on the forefront of it, we also continue to grapple with the fact that some of the biggest promises of modernity remain unfulfilled.
    Corbusier in Berlin

    Before we show that the answer to the challenges we confront today can still be better informed by modernist thinking than by a re-institution of the 19th century urban gestalt canon, it may be useful to define the term modernism. How hard it proves to be to define modernism is our first indication why there are so many misunderstandings.

    Tate Modern, the gallery in London has a very brief definition:
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    Klaus Philipsen FAIA
    Archplan Inc. Philipsen Architects
    Baltimore MD
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