Modernity

Definition

Modernity is the historical condition characterized by industrialization, urbanization, capitalism, secularization, and the belief in progress — the epoch initiated by the Enlightenment and still, in various accounts, ongoing or exhausted. In this wiki, modernity is contested across multiple registers. For Benjamin, modernity names the experience of the metropolitan city: shock, the crowd, the flâneur, the decay of dwelling, and the dialectical images that crystallize this experience. For Heynen, modernity's dialectic is between the "programmatic" (the functional, liberatory project) and the "transitory" (the ephemeral, the shock of the new) — a split architecture inherits as the tension between dwelling and homelessness. For Latour, "we have never been modern": modernity's constitutive work of purification (separating nature from culture) has always failed, producing ever more hybrids. Modernity is thus the condition architecture both inhabits and, in its critical tradition, resists.

Key Thinkers

• Walter Benjamin — metropolitan modernity; shock, the flâneur, the decay of dwelling.
• Bruno Latour — "we have never been modern"; purification and hybridization.
• Brian Elliott — Benjamin's genealogy of urbanization as an account of modernity.
• Hilde Heynen — modernity's dialectic: programmatic/transitory, dwelling/homelessness.

Related Concepts

• Modernism — the aesthetic movement within modernity.
• Dwelling — what modernity destabilizes.
• Hybrids — what modernity produces despite itself.
• Nonhumans — the agents modernity's purification excludes.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Benjamin for Architects — Benjamin's account of metropolitan modernity.
• Latour for Architects — "we have never been modern."