Utopia and Designed Futures

There seems to be a number of themes emerging from the blog. Recently I have been viewing Adam Curtis’s All Watched Over by Machine of Loving Grace with fascination and I have already been struck by the similarities between the beliefs of techno-evangelists and those of the high priests of modernism. I discussed this issue in a blog entry titled “The ‘Architecture’ of the Web: Digital Utopias and Dystopias”


The first episode of Curtis’s documentary begins with the Ayn Rand and her philosophy of objectivism while the second episode deals with partially the ideas of the architect Buckminster-Fuller.
Modernist design and designers influenced by the ideas the Constructivists, the Futurists, the Bauhaus and De Stijl, thought they could change society with their creations. Architecture was the main expression of these claims. However, whole areas of our culture have been altered by the modernist belief that technology could produce a better and less divided society. Designers with their declaration that ‘form follows function’ have endeavoured to make designs seem progressive, functional and rational and less ornate, in direct opposition to the Arts and Crafts Movement and the luxury style of Art Nouveau. Architectural drawings have influenced science fiction illustration and writing, while buildings have been important backdrops to films and television programmes and are alluded to in graphic design (one thinks of Peter York's name for designers: "gridniks"). The novel Fountainhead (1943) by Ayn Rand, later made into a film (dir. King Vidor 1949), explores the idea of the image of the designer as a priest, social thinker and lifestyle guru. It is interesting to note that Rand’s protagonist was said to be based on the ‘image’ of Frank Lloyd Wright. Today, the more representational computer games include architectural renderings and web and multi-media design speaks in architectural metaphors. The modernist ideas in typography and the presentation of information in grid forms are reminiscent of the International Typographical Style and usability heuristics in web design. Post World War Two and certainly after 1960, designers opposed to what they saw as the minimalism and sterility of modern designs have been referred to as post-modern. Tom Wolfe in his book From Bauhaus to our House (1981) criticises Le Corbusier and Gropius and Utopia and the whole concept of architect as design guru.






Further reading and Sources:


Bock, Manfred et al. De Stijl: 1917-1931: visions of utopia Oxford: Phaidon, 1982
Fer, B et al. Realism, rationalism, surrealism: art between the wars Yale University Press in association with Open University, 1993
Lamster, Mark Architecture and film New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000
Loos, Adolf Spoken into the void: collected essays, 1897-1900 Cambridge, Mass.: Published for the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago, Ill. and the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, New York, N.Y, MIT Press, 1982
Mansbach, Steven A. Visions of totality: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Theo van Doesburg, and El Lissitzky UMI Research Press, 1980
Margolin, Victor The struggle for utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917-1946 London: University of Chicago Press, 1997
Moore, Thomas Utopia London: Dent, 1985
Overy, Paul De Stijl London: Thames and Hudson, c1991
Ward, Glenn Paul Postmodernism London: Teach Yourself, 1997

Modernism, Modernity and Modernité: Omissions and Corrections.

Modernity is a word that is often used as an overarching periodizing term to denote a historical era. In my first comments regarding this I do make this clear, however I stated that we began with 18th Century Enlightenment, something that is true, but ignores some aspects of modernity’s development that starts in earlier centuries.  I did not emphasis that Modernity refers to a post-traditional, post-medieval historical period. So in a way we may begin somewhere in the Renaissance with the marked by the move from feudalism (or agrarianism) towards capitalism in say 14^th Century Florence or even earlier. In England we saw the power of the King challenged by parliament leading to the English Civil War. At this point around 1650 we witness the development of the Public Sphere and opening of the first coffee house in Oxford.  It is perhaps important to note that Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations and Denis Diderot is said to have written parts of the Encyclopédie in a coffee house. The coffee house becomes the great social condenser of 18^th Century France, helping to break down class barriers. This is discussed in Adam Hart Davis’ Eureka Years http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/player/b00cdvk0. Modernity also means a shift towards industrialization, secularization, rationalization and the nation-state. So we see an overarching period from the Renaissance to Enlightenment or Age of Reason, to the Age of Revolutions (American, Industrial, French, 1848, Russian) concluding Post WWII, especially after 1968.

Modernité is concerned with a distinctly modern sense of dislocation and ambiguity and locates it in the more general experience of the aestheticization of everyday life, as exemplified in the ephemeral and transitory qualities of an urban culture shaped by the imperatives of fashion, consumerism, and constant innovation. Here one may consider Baudelaire, Manet or Toulouse Lautrec.

Modernism describes the art, culture, design and style of a historical period: the Modern Age or Modernity. The term is used by Charles Baudelaire in the mid-nineteenth century to designate a new field of action for the artist. For Baudelaire it describes the culture of the “modern world” or bourgeois industrial society. It is about what is new in one’s own culture and implied an obligation to be of one’s own time. The exact character of this age, as well as its precise dates (although generally speaking the mid -19th Century is often cited as a start date), are described in very different ways by critics and historians (see Richard Kostelanetz and Robert Hughes amongst many others). I think it is fair to say that modernism can vary from country to country and varies from practice to practice Modernist theatre, film, art, photography; design may begin at very different times. Anyway, modernism is often associated with faith in: progress, optimism, rationalism and clarity of communication in some contexts.  With the early days of modernism there was the utopian belief that mechanization and technology if properly channelled could produce a less divided society, perhaps by the seventies and eighties this started to look absurd. The end of modernism corresponds with the “collapse” of modernity: the architecture historian Charles Jenks gives us the year 1972 and even the exact minute of the collapse (I mean this literally) of modernism and the modern movement with the destruction of Pruitt–Igoe the housing complex designed by Minoru Yamasaki. I think that it was Robert Hughes in The New Shock of the New that refers to 9/11 as modernisms final moments.  The World Trade Centre was also designed by Minoru Yamasaki.

Modernism and Modernity