Modernity and Modernism

Modernity- The quality or state of being modern."a shopping mall would instill a spirit of modernity into this village".
Fresh,new,contemporary.


Modernism-Modernism, also known as the Modern Movement, marked a conscious break with the past and has been one of the dominant expressions of design practice, production, and theory in the 20th century and is generally characterized visually by the use of modern materials such as tubular steel and glass, the manipulation of abstract forms, space and light, and a restrained palette, dominated by white, off-white, grey, and black. Following on from the well-known phrase ‘Ornament and Crime’ coined by Adolf Loos as the title of an article of 1908, later echoed by Le Corbusier in his assertion that ‘trash is always abundantly decorated’, was the notion that the surfaces were generally plain. When decoration was used it was restrained and attuned to the abstract aesthetic principles of the artistic avant-garde such as those associated with De Stijl orConstructivism. Also closely associated with Modernism was the maxim ‘form follows function’ although in reality this was often more symbolic than the case in reality, a visual metaphor for the Zeitgeist or spirit of the age. Nonetheless Modernism found forms of material expression alongside exciting, new, and rapidly evolving forms of transport and communication, fresh modes of production and materials coupled to technological and scientific change, alongside a contemporary lifestyle powered by electricity.

The roots of Modernism lie in the design reform movement of the 19th century and were nurtured in Germany in the years leading up to the First World War. The Modernist legacy is considerable in terms of design (whether furniture, tableware, textiles, lighting, advertising, and typography or other everyday things), architecture (whether public or private housing, cinemas, office blocks, and corporate headquarters), or writings (theories, manifestos, books, periodicals, and criticism). This has done much to cement Modernism firmly into the mainstream history of design. Furthermore, it is also heavily represented in numerous museums around the world that have centred their design collections drawn from the later 19th century through to the last quarter of the 20th century around the Modernist aesthetic and its immediate antecedents. This focused collecting policy has generally been at the expense of the representation of many other aspects of design consumed by the majority in the same period. Typifying such an outlook has been the Museum of Modern Art in New York, established in 1929. The curatorial inclinations of Philip Johnson, Eliot Noyes, and Edgar Kaufmann Jr. dominated its collecting policy for several decades. A further significant reason for the prominence of Modernism in accounts of design in the 1920s and, more particularly, the 1930s has been the fact that it was underpinned by social utopian ideals and identified with radical avant-garde tendencies opposed to the repressive political and aesthetic agendas of totalitarian regimes that dominated in Germany, Russia, and Italy. In general, official architecture and design practice under Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin favoured an authoritarian, stripped down neoclassical style, leading many progressive designers in Germany in particular to emigrate in the face of restricted professional opportunities and increasing political and social oppression. In dictator Benito Mussolini's Fascist Italy, the position was slightly more ambivalent during the 1920s but the Modernist aspirations of those associated with Italian Rationalism found little official patronage in the interwar years. To many eyes in 1930s Britain Modernism was also felt to reflect ‘Bolshevik’ tendencies and was out of tune with the more historically inclined stylistic rhetoric of British imperialism (see British Empire Exhibition), an outlook that oriented Britain away from continental Europe towards the dominions and colonies of Empire. Known also as the International Style from the late 1920s onwards, a later phase of Modernism was also, by its very definition and aspiration, opposed to the strongly nationalistic tendencies in many countries in the turbulent political and economic climate of the 1930s. Less affected by the political turmoil in the rest of Europe were Holland and Scandinavia where Modernism found considerable opportunities for further development and dissemination. After the Second World War the International Style was taken up by many major multinational companies for the architecture, interiors, furniture, and furnishings and equipment of their offices and showrooms, thus promoting themselves through their emphatically modern identity as efficient, up-to-date, and internationally significant organizations in a global economy. In the eyes of some, Modernism's earlier associations with social democratic ideals had been transmuted in its later manifestations to support capitalist ends. Used widely in design and architecture in the 1950s and 1960s, such stylistic traits also attracted increasing criticism from a younger generation of designers, architects, and critics who felt that an abstract design vocabulary that had evolved in the early decades of the 20th century was no longer relevant in an era of rapid and dynamic change, of television and radically developing media and communication systems, and of swiftly developing opportunities for mass travel and the direct experience of other cultures. Such trends found expression in the increasingly rich and vibrant vocabulary of Postmodernism, echoed in the increasingly ephemeral lifestyle enjoyed by those in the industrial world with greater levels of disposable income. Ideas about what was called ‘Good Design’ in the 1950s and 1960s were formally linked to the Modernist aesthetic but without the social utopian underpinning promoted by many of the first generation of Modernists in the interwar years. In Britain such objects were approved by the state-funded Council of Industrial Design (see Design Council) and seen in opposition to the elaborate styling and obsolescence inherent in American design that was becoming attractive to British consumers, whilst in the United States, at theMuseum of Modern Art in New York, they were also seen as exemplars of European restraint.

A key text that has played an important role in defining Modernism has been Nikolaus Pevsner's widely read book, first published as Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936). It has subsequently undergone substantial revisions (including a major one supported by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1949) and numerous reprints under the title of Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius. Pevsner provides an account of the ways in which John Ruskin, William Morris, and exponents of the Arts and Crafts Movement fought against what they saw as the morally decadent and materialistic indulgence in historical ornamentation, inappropriate use of materials, and ‘dishonest’ modes of construction widely prevalent in Victorian design. This period was seen as a prelude to the clean, abstract, machine-made forms of 20th-century Modernism seen in the work of members of the Deutscher Werkbund and the teachers and students at the Bauhaus. Unlike the stylistic historicism of Victorian design, Modernism was felt to reflect the Zeitgeist. Its first phase emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when arts and crafts principles of ‘honesty of construction’, ‘truth to materials’, and rejection of historical encyclopaedism were reconciled with the mass-production potential of the machine and blended with the embrace of new materials, technologies, and abstract forms. Important in such considerations, the main thrust of which moved from Britain to Germany, aided by the writings and outlook of Hermann Muthesius. He had worked as architectural attaché to the German Embassy in London in 1896, gaining a first-hand knowledge of progressive design thinking in Britain at the time. After returning to Germany in 1903, he was given major responsibilities for art and design education and influenced the appointment to key institutional posts of major figures such as Peter Behrens before taking up the Chair of Applied Arts at Berlin Commercial University in 1907. Muthesius was also a key figure in the establishment of the Deutscher Werkbund (DWB), founded in Munich in 1907 with the aim of improving the quality and design of German consumer products. There were considerable differences of opinion between those such as Henry van de Velde who believed in the primacy of individual artistic expression and supporters of Muthesius who favoured the use of standardized forms allied to quality production as a means of achieving economic success. The DWB and its celebrated large-scale exhibition in Cologne in 1914 attracted the attention of designers throughout Europe including members of the Swedish Society of Industrial Design and some of those associated with the foundation of the Design and Industries Association in Britain in 1915. Another important German exemplar of the exploration of new materials and abstract forms in its modernizing products, buildings, interiors, and corporate identity in the years leading up to the First World War was the large electricity generating and manufacturing company, AEG, whose design policy was coordinated by Peter Behrens.

Despite the massive disruption of the First World War certain aspects of avant-garde activity continued during the 1914-18 period, most notably the work of the De Stijl group in Holland, founded by Theo Van Doesburg in 1917. In Germany many of the progressive ideas at the core of Modernism were developed at the German Bauhaus, founded in Weimar in 1919 under the directorship of Walter Gropius. This radical and influential institution brought together art, craft, and design, allied to architecture, and was influenced strongly in the early 1920s by the ideas of De Stijl and Russian Constructivism. Many of those associated with it were major defining figures of Modernism including Marcel Breuer, Herbert Bayer, Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, László Moholy-Nagy, Wilhelm Wagenfeld, Anni and Josef Albers, Marianne Brandt, and Gunta Stölzl. By the mid-1920s the DWB began to reassert an influence on contemporary design debates, whether through exhibitions such as Form ohne Ornament (Form without Ornament) in 1924 or the recommencement of publication of its propagandist magazine Die Forme. Modernism in Germany was also taken up in the mid-1920s by municipal authorities such as that in Frankfurt that instituted a large-scale housing programme under the City Architect Ernst May, developed ergonomic kitchen designs under Greta Schütte-Lihotsky, and promoted many aspects of a Modernist lifestyle in its magazine Das Neue Frankfurt. Similar developments could be found in many other European cities such as Rotterdam in Holland and Warsaw in Poland, as well as the large-scale Die Wohnung (The Dwelling) exhibition organized by the DWB in Stuttgart in 1927 where a number of buildings by leading Modernists were shown. These included designs by Le Corbusier from France, Mart Stam, and J. J. P. Oud from Holland, and Gropius and Mies Van Der Rohe from Germany and Victor Bourgeois from Belgium, all of which contained furniture and fittings that were characterized by a lightweight Modernist aesthetic very different from the heavy, often intrusive forms of traditional furniture. This collective manifestation reflected the increasingly international orientation of the movement, a dimension that attracted increasing antagonism on the part of conservative manufacturers, designers, architects, and critics who saw the style as un-Germanic and portrayed its designers and manufacturers as Bolsheviks, Jews, and other foreigners. In France, the Modernist cause had been effectively prosecuted by Le Corbusier, sustained by his theoretical writings such as Vers une architecture (1923) and L'Art decoratifs d'aujourd'hui (1925) and promoted in full public view in his uncompromising Pavillon de L'Esprit Nouveau at the Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels of 1925. His stand against the prevailing decorative ethos of the luxurious pavilions elsewhere on the site was followed through in the establishment of the Union des Artistes Modernes (UAM) in 1929. This was the same year in which another important organization that furthered the international impact of Modernism was founded: the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM). In Sweden the Modernist debate was very much to the fore at the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930, following which a more humanizing dimension was seen with the emergence of what became known as Swedish Modern with its partiality for natural materials seen in the work of Bruno Mathsson and Josef Frank and articles promoted, manufactured, and sold by Svenskt Tenn in Stockholm. Other Scandinavian examples may be seen in the work of Alvar and Aino Aalto in Finland or Kaare Klint in Denmark. Modernism was also evident in both the graphic and rug design work of Edward McKnight Kauffer that was characterized by the interplay of flat, geometric forms similar to those explored by Marion Dorn, SergeChermayeff and drawing on the pioneering work of Gunta Stölzl, Anni Albers, and others at the Dessau Bauhaus in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

There were also several ways in which aspects of Modernism could be seen in certain outputs of the later phases of Art Deco, such as the use of flat, abstract shapes, geometrically conceived forms and modern materials in much American design work of the later 1920s and 1930s including some of the furniture of Paul Frankl, Donald Deskey, and Gilbert Rohde. American Streamlining also exhibited a number of modernizing tendencies, also blending new materials with clean, often organically inspired, forms that also drew on abstract decorative motifs symbolizing speed. In fact many dimensions of Modernist design endured throughout the rest of the 20th century, whether manifest in Charles Jencks's notions of Late Modernism or even incorporation as playful or ironic quotation in Postmodernism.