ESSAY

Modernism Again?
The evolving marriage of design and technology

By Pierluigi Serraino

Judging by the impressive sales of Peter Gay’s latest book Modernism, this monumental period in the history of humankind commands our attention more than ever. Sweeping away centuries of political and social order, modernism’s effect on all domains of knowledge was so radical and irreversible that every aspect of the physical and cultural environment underwent scrutiny. Music, science, economics, engineering and the fine arts each went through their own revolutions. Architecture and design were no exception. Architecture, especially, responsive as it is to the collective forces that shape the identity of civilization, reflected the magnitude of this sea change in the city fabric that hosts the everyday life of the modern citizen. So violent and final was the rejection of the past in modernism’s early days that the juxtaposition between old and new was uncompromising.

In that initial phase, first in the United Kingdom and shortly afterwards in the rest of Europe, architecture was responding to problems left unresolved since the Industrial Revolution. In its infancy, modernism took the side of a working class brutalized by inhumane living conditions — the shortcomings of the rapid urban densification sparked by the emergence of a manufacturing economy. However, it took well over 100 years from the dawn of the industrial age for a new relationship between design and industrial technology to be understood as a tool for improving the lives of the labor force. Words such as mass production, functionality and economy of means permanently entered the vocabulary of the modern architect to push away the romantic, pre-industrial world of the crafts and welcome the new era of machine-made artifacts. This architecture of precision, based on scientific knowledge, ergonomics, optimal density, lighting conditions and existens minimum, was a material manifesto against the empty pomposity of 19th-century historical revivalist architecture.

In the leap across the Atlantic, however, modern architecture landed in a country with an entirely different set of concerns. By the late 1930s, the masters of the Modern Movement, with the exception of Le Corbusier, had taken up posts at Ivy League universities in the United States and were raising a new breed of American architect. In his 1981 book From Bauhaus to Our House, Tom Wolfe justifiably attacked the fallacy of applying the old continent’s socio-political program to America. In Europe, influenced by a Marxist perspective, architects engaged in a form of class struggle by attending to the needs of the working class, the most vulnerable social strata. For European modernists, affordable housing was the equivalent of religious architecture in medieval times. The United States, on the other hand, was historically driven by the notion of self-determination, of the power of its citizens to shape their own destiny. Moreover, with the exception of New York, Philadelphia and Boston, it had little urban density akin to the typical European city. The might of the American industrial complex was the pride of the private sector and the magnet for global immigration to the New World. Given this dissimilar political scenario, the discourse that supported the collaboration of modern architecture with new technology would not stand.

Yet there was an equal interest among American architects in such collaboration. In his essay “The Modern House,” published in the mid 1930s, Philip Johnson wrote, “…our entire concept of house-building must change … to reap the advantages made available by modern invention and improvement.” Revisiting patterns of living and increasing comfort for all citizens became the goal. The challenge was convincing a conservative public.

What to do then? In 1932, Alfred H. Barr, director of the young Museum of Modern Art in New York, came up with the label “International Style” (according to noted cultural critic Lewis Mumford, neither Henry Russell Hitchcock nor Philip Johnson coined the term). This extreme makeover shed the left-wing political connotations of the new architectural aesthetic, making it palatable to New York’s power elite. Clean lines, industrial materials and lack of ornament were some of the design ingredients, cleansed of their socially progressive European roots, that made up the American modernist recipe. Publication of radically modernist private homes designed by architects such as Rudolf Schindler and Richard Neutra on the West Coast and William Lescaze and Edward Durell Stone on the East, together with the heady euphoria surrounding the 1939 World’s Fair, prepped the public to endorse grand modernist landmarks. The Equitable Building (1948) in Portland, Oregon, by Piero Belluschi, the Lever House (1951) by Skidmore,