Modernism

Definition

Modernism names both a historical period (roughly the early 20th century) and an aesthetic movement that, across the arts, broke with historical styles in favor of abstraction, industrial production, and functional form. In architecture specifically, modernism — often referred to as Modern architecture or the Modern Movement — rejected historical ornament, embraced industrial materials (steel, glass, concrete), and elevated spatial purity and function as governing principles. Its canonical figures include Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and the Bauhaus. As a body of doctrine, it was codified by CIAM and disseminated internationally through Sigfried Giedion's Space, Time and Architecture. The dictum "form follows function" and Le Corbusier's "machine-for-living" became its slogans; Venturi and Jencks later made its orthodoxies the primary target of postmodern critique.

Modernism is internally split between its emancipatory promise (clarity, hygiene, social housing, the dissolution of ornament, the progressive social potential of collective housing) and its technocratic reduction (functionalism, the erasure of dwelling, spatial purity as ideology). For Benjamin, modernism is ambivalent: it is the loss of the bourgeois dwelling interior but also the "progressive social potential of architectural modernism against Heidegger's valorization of pre-industrial dwelling" (Elliott). This tension — "Architecture and Revolution" (Benjamin/Marx) vs. "Architecture or Revolution" (Le Corbusier) — remains central to the wiki's critical treatment of the modernist legacy. Tafuri later historicized this split as architecture's ideological instrument, and Frampton's critical regionalism attempted an internal correction without abandoning modernism's core.
The term Modern architecture is used interchangeably with modernism in this wiki, though in narrower contexts Modern architecture emphasizes the specifically architectural movement, doctrine, and canon rather than modernism as a broader cultural and aesthetic phenomenon.

Summerson adds a genealogical thesis to this picture: modernism is the classical tradition's continuation, not its simple negation. "An exact understanding of what we so vaguely and airily call modern can only come through an understanding of its classical parentage": Behrens's AEG turbine hall is a temple in paraphrase (steel stanchions as colonnade, a multangular "pediment"), Perret's concrete depot "thought out in terms of 'orders'" without expressing them, and Le Corbusier replaced the token orders with Renaissance-style proportional control (tracés régulateurs, Modulor). Classicism's last legacy is "rational procedure controlling – and inciting – invention." Summerson also declared the architectural revolution complete by 1963, with questions of form receding before "questions of building rather than architecture" — a premature obituary the wiki's postmodern and parametric material implicitly refutes.

Key Thinkers

• Le Corbusier — five points of architecture, machine-for-living, plan libre.
• Walter Benjamin — modernism's split: bourgeois dwelling vs. modernist housing; wish-images.
• Martin Heidegger — critique of modernism's loss of dwelling in "Building Dwelling Thinking."
• Sigfried Giedion — Space, Time and Architecture, principal historiographer of the Modern Movement.
• Manfredo Tafuri — critique of Modern architecture as ideological instrument.
• Kenneth Frampton — critical regionalism as modernism's internal critique.
• Robert Venturi — Complexity and Contradiction as the first major postmodern challenge to Modern orthodoxy.
• Brian Elliott — Benjamin's affirmation of modernism's "progressive social potential."

Related Concepts

• Modernity — the historical condition modernism is an aesthetic response to.
• Dwelling — what modernism is accused of erasing; the Heideggerian counter-concept.
• Housing — the modernist program that replaces dwelling.
• Postmodernism — the reaction against Modern architecture's orthodoxies.
• The Duck — Venturi's term for Modern architecture's fusion of form and symbol.
• Ornament vs. Purity — the debate over whether ornament is crime or necessity.
• Decorated Shed — the postmodern alternative to Modernist formal purity.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Benjamin for Architects — the shift from bourgeois dwelling to modernist housing.
• Building Dwelling Thinking — the critique of modern housing.
• Learning from Las Vegas — the foundational postmodern challenge to Modern orthodoxy.
• Fifty Years of "Learning from Las Vegas" — retrospective on the Modern/postmodern split.
• The Classical Language of Architecture — modernism's "classical parentage": Behrens, Perret and Le Corbusier as continuators of the classical language in steel and concrete; the primitive-hut rationalism of Laugier as the Movement's eighteenth-century germ.

Open Questions

• What remains of the Modern architectural project in contemporary practice?
• Is sustainability a continuation or a repudiation of Modernist functionalism?
• Can Benjamin's "wish-image" reading of modernism be reconciled with Tafuri's ideological critique, or do they describe two different modernisms?