Modernity & Modernism

Modernity & Modernism
The modernist project can be roughly defined as the era starting circa 1760 and concluding around 1960. Today we are living in the Post Modern world.

What do we mean by modern?
Modern implies that something is better than it was before. Things are not modernised to make something worse. Modern has positive connotations and can be linked to words such as ‘progress’, ‘change’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘new’- an ideology linked to commodity culture. Using the example of ‘new’, New Labour can be seen as a political example of how the new, the modern, is seen as an improvement on what preceded it. The Tate Modern implies the idea of a new, forward thinking institution.

Hirling Shepherd: William Holman
Not everything in the modern era is modernist. The Hirling Shepherd is a painting from the modern era but has been executed in a classical style. Both the style and subject of the image is traditional. The concept of a shepherd seducing a girl on a farm as the animals run wild is not at all modernist.

The City
By 1900, Paris has become the world’s most modern city. Previously, like other European cities, Central Paris had narrow and awkward street patterns that promoted unhygienic conditions, fit only for the poorest residents of the city. The modernist project welcomed Haussmann with his grand plans for Paris. Wide, spacious, tree-lined boulevards improved efficiency, but most importantly helped control society more easily. Flanking the boulevards were extravagant new buildings, equipped with balconies. The rich moved in as the slums were swept away, and they admired man’s creation from the balconies and terraces of the buildings.

Paris didn’t just ‘build the modern’, it revelled in it. The Grand Exposition brought many new structures to Paris including the famous Eiffel Tower. These grand steel and iron icons of modernity and industrialisation dominated the cityscape.

Later, New York became the world’s most advanced city. As New York was laid out, the grid pattern ensured maximum efficiency. Skyscrapers maximised available space in the city. An image illustrates a park surrounded by buildings; Central Park is a manmade creation within the urban jungle. These artificial environments demonstrate how nature had its place within the order and rationale of the human creation.

Modernism
Modernism can be defined as the cultural interpretations to the experience of the modern world. It is seen as utopian. From a design perspective, a few concepts are raised:
1. Truth to Materials
2. Embrace new technology
3. Function over Form
4. Progress
5. Anti-historicism: Not looking back at the past and the hierarchies of the old.
6. Globalisation: Making things universal and accessible to all. A new international language, perhaps somewhat born out of the fall of colonisation.
7. The idea that changing environments would change people’s thinking.
8.