Rev Peter Barnes at my church growing up would always write an article in the newsletter with this title, and I have some "it seems to me" thoughts right now.
I have been learning a lot about Modernism in my architectural experience so far. I have been doing a design excercise that started out looking very much like a Mondrian painting of the de Stihl movement of the 20's in the Netherlands and Germany.
The ideas/terms/ethos (ethi?) of Modernism and post-Modernism was never explicitly expressed to me as an undergrad, which I find inexcusible for an English department. Modernism, in a small nutshell, came out of the mechanization of the Industrial Revolution. It came out of the Enlightenment, or Scientific Revolution. The Avante-garde, was a specific group of people who saught not to just make something new and shocking, but new and shocking, because they meant it to move us forward into a time where all men were equal, and there was a great continuum of all ideas, good will, and friendship. The bastions, hopeless traditions and comforts of aristocracy must be destroyed. Le Corbusier, one of the most famous 20th century Architects built one shining white building after another that looked like a ship, taking us into the future. Architecture and art were the vehicles for a new world. They were very passionate, not simply destroyers, but people with a great hope.
They thought that science and machine, technological advance would help set people free. They build everything they could out of pure forms, that alluded to no previous ideas. They built everything out of new materials, concrete, steel, glass. All spaces were open, free, continuous.
I have more to say about this...
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