What is Modernism?
By Sudip Bose | From Preservation | May/June 2008
Philip Johnson's Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut—one of 28 National Trust Historic Sites.
Trying to define modernism can be a frustrating exercise. As a style, it is less coherent, its boundaries looser, than, say, classicism. Many critics would argue that modernism is not even a singular style, that it incorporates a great variety of aesthetics and sensibilities. And just who were the modernists? Frank Lloyd Wright vehemently opposed being grouped with them, but modernist architecture would not have been the same without him.
Modernism roughly spans the time between World War I and the early 1970s. What we generally think of as the modernist ethic evolved first in Europe, among such architects as Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius, the latter two of the German Bauhaus school. The European modernists imbued their work with an inherent morality and social consciousness and were often associated with left-wing politics. Intrigued by the emerging technologies of the day, they embraced concrete, glass, and steel in their revolutionary creations. They eschewed ornament, rejecting what they saw as the frivolous strokes of Victorian and art nouveau styles. Their work was both spare (think of Mies' famous dictum "Less is more") and lyrical. Perhaps above all, they believed in function dictating form, though many architects, such as Le Corbusier, would eventually distance themselves from that tenet.
In 1932, Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock curated a landmark exhibition at New York City's Museum of Modern Art in which they coined the term International Style. Aside from introducing the work of architects such as Mies to the American public, the exhibit consciously tried to define a movement. The ground was now broken for a distinctly American modernism to emerge, and the architects who subsequently worked in this country became less concerned with the moral and social aspects of building and more interested in appearance. Jonathan Glancey, the architecture editor of The Guardian, sums up the movement this way: "Modernism was not simply a style: but more of an attitude, a determination to break with the past and free the architect from the stifling rules of convention and etiquette."
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Comments
Submitted by Futura Girl at: May 8, 2008
We have had an ongoing public discussion on "What is Modernism for some time on Lotta Living. For those who would like to participate in the ongoing discussion, you may view it here: http://www.lottaliving.com/bb/viewtopic.php?p=68289
Submitted by James Rose's residence, NJ at: May 5, 2008
From www.jamesrosecenter.org Along with Garrett Eckbo and Dan Kiley, James C. Rose was one of the leaders of the modern movement in American landscape architecture. He never graduated from high school (because he refused to take music and mechanical drafting) but nevertheless managed to enroll in architecture courses at Cornell University. A few years later he transferred, as a special student, to Harvard University to study landscape architecture. He was soon expelled from Harvard in 1937 for refusing to design landscapes in the Beaux Arts manner. The design experiments for which he was expelled served as a basis for a series of provocative articles expounding modernism in landscape design, published in 1938 and 1939 in Pencil Points magazine (now Progressive Architecture). Subsequently Rose authored many other articles, including a series with Eckbo and Kiley, as well as four books which advance both the theory and practice of landscape architecture in the twentieth century. Rose was employed briefly in New York City in 1941 as a landscape architect by Tuttle, Seelye, Place and Raymond, but ultimately did his most signifiicant work as a sole practioner. Rose's primary contribution was his brilliant fusion of indoor and outdoor space, best exemplified in his Ridgewood, NJ, home. In 1953 he began building the Rose residence in Ridgewood, New Jersey. Today is is preserved by a non-profit group led by Landscape Architect Dean Cardasis. Visit web site for more information and contacts.