Modernism DB

I could say that modernism sucks as an architectural style.

I could complain that it never uses traditional forms,

That it never has any details,

That squares are just plain boring,

Or that it never resembles any part of nature, such as a flower bud or a spider,

But I’d be wrong.

Granted, most “modern” architecture in the usual sense of the word is based on a boring box shape. But not all of it is. And the reasoning behind the modernist movement was not always about breaking with nature out of spite or pride. The modernist movement developed out of a world war and a disillusioned society. People looked at older architectural styles with disdain, noting that classical forms such as huge stairs and grand columns “defined a hierarchical order,” while “Gothic ornament…expressed pain…[and] our guilt, pointing to a heaven we could never reach” (504). Modernism was not necessarily created to break with nature. On the contrary, the Paradise Now article talks about how glass, one of modernism’s primary materials, “offered social redemption” symbolically through the light streaming through it – “the light of heaven itself” (502). And modernism focused on simplicity not because it didn’t care about nature or God, but as a “stern abjuration of the world’s sensuous pleasures in the interest of higher ones” (502). Sure, a lot of modern buildings are plain, even bordering on ugly, but I think there can be great beauty in simplicity (and simplicity, as well as diversity, is also found in nature). So I hope we will not be too quick to judge all modern architecture as ugly and heathen.