The Backsliding of Modernism

A conversation today with a potential client provided a troubling insight into the current state of Modernism. The client expressed concern about their house being too “modern.” Looking at photos, “modern” to them was a style that meant something they didn’t quite relate to. Yet as we discussed what their objectives were, they expressed a desire for the home to be centered around practicalities and function; they did not want ostentatious ornamentation, monumental exaggerations, or unnecessary complexity. The origins of Modernism, I explained, were in stripping away the style of the Renaissance, that is to say the rigid, formulaic design orders that after five centuries had become a roadblock to innovation, a repetition of dated forms that worked against the spirit of the time. In its place, Le Corbusier proposed stripping away the excess to find a new aesthetic, turning to the functional structures of the modern industrial world for innovation. With this, Modernism was born. Attention to function was to be the central aesthetic of this new architecture.

In this context I felt a certain sadness that the client’s desire for practicality seemed to stand against the aesthetic they associated with Modernism. These clients were in the class of regular, educated citizens – not likely experts in architectural history – yet they saw hyper-practicality to be at odds with what they knew as Modernism. Modernism to them was a style, a system of forms, surfaces, and “looks” that worked against their desire for the pure, simple expression of a practical life.

Modernism was not conceived as a style, but the end of style; the beginning of a new design approach that preferenced function, space, and reduction to base elements over surface decoration and object-based design. That was the new architecture. Yet it appears that one hundred years later, in Utah at least, we have converted Modernism into the thing it was meant to replace. Is it time once again for a new architecture?

Photo: a grain silo from Le Corbusier’s Vers Une Architecture, rendered Towards a New Architecture in English.