I understand that original modernism was created as a “breath of fresh air and possibility” (Bump 504) after the catastrophic effects of the First World War Designers felt it necessary to take into their own hands the pain and exhaustion of the general population and create a new utopian style. However, they failed to realize that “What ordinary people wanted was culture they could relax into- the middle-class comfort of the upholstered armchair, not the bracing, challenging austerities of chrome tubes and leather thongs” (Bump 502). It cannot be contested that their old society had been shattered, and through rebuilding it would not be the same, but this fact does not override the basic human instinct for comfort and aesthetics.

To claim that “a work of art is just one more consumer product among others” (Bump 500) seems almost blasphemous and contradictory to the very nature of art. I find this warped belief to contribute greatly to what Miller described as a “disappearance of God” from modern society. Like Brad, I don’t necessarily agree that God has disappeared, I believe that people have stopped looking for Him, as they are blinded to “the words of the sacrament [bringing] about the transubstantiation of the natural elements” (Miller 491) by the functional austerity that modernism is often characterized by.

“The industrialization and urbanization of man means the progressive transformation of the world. Everything is changed from its natural state into something useful and meaningless to man” (Bump 492). This common ideal of form following function has deliberately severed our most primal connection with nature, and in doing so broken our immediate and constant interaction with the divine. I am confident that searching for such spirituality will bring one fulfillment and enlightenment, but it is far more difficult in a society where God is “hidden somewhere behind the silence of infinite spaces, and our literary [or architectural] symbols can only make distant allusions to him, or to the natural world which used to be his abiding place and home” (Miller 493). I am positive God exists and is present everywhere I go, but I find myself more immediately and directly confronted with his Awesome power when at piece with nature rather than our humanized world.