Disenchanted Architecture: Modernism and the Humane

The Rationalizing Modernity

Max Weber considered modernity to be a result of rationalization. He held that “the spiritual character of traditional societies had been superseded, at least in the Western world, by a highly rational and calculated approach to the world”, which prioritized the achievement of an end over the human implications of how that achievement was brought about. In other words, a social system that neglects the very humanity which is assumed it would promote. Humanity, for Weber, is reduced in such a rationalized world to calculation, measurement, and control; and society is preoccupied with reason, stability, and discipline.[1]

Modernism as a Rationalized Architecture

The architectural era known as modernism is generally dated from the late 19th century till about the 1960s and is thereby contemporaneous with Western modernity. It would therefore be safe to assume that modernism was a product of modernity’s challenges and ideals. Modernist architects faced the industrial society’s living conditions and had a strong sense of social responsibility towards raising the living conditions of the masses and workers,[2] and experienced the technology, industry, and modern building materials that redefined the urban landscape.

Likewise, similar to the manner by which philosophical modernity favored the standardized and calculable, modernism “tried to reduce architecture as well to first principles”. Modern interpretations of architecture, such as Gottfried Semper’sFour Elements of Architecture and Le Corbusier’s Five Elements of a New Architecture could be seen as attempts to reduce architecture to elemental forms, which were easier to standardize and calculate. Some critics claimed such reductionist analyses stripped architectural elements of their symbolic meaning, becoming “plug-in modules, without a hierarchy of values”.[3]

Architects started seeing architecture and urban through industrialist lenses. Le Corbusier declared the house should be a machine to live in, with standardized houses sometimes designed even with fixed furniture to maintain uniformity[4]. The growth of major standardized housing projects in the post-war era was the culmination of such industrialist architectural ideals.

Architectural stances on design, such as Adolf Loos’s critique of ornament and Louis Sullivan’s famous “form follows function”, can also be viewed as expressions of modernity’s ideals and aspirations towards efficiency and rationality. Indeed, some theorists also argue that the so-called utopian visions of modernist architects were not a product of Marxist or fascist ideologies, but in fact a result of Fordism’s and Taylorism’s aim for efficiency and standardization.[5]

Modernist Utopias and the Human Scale.

How did the rationalized architecture of modernism relate to the people? It would be enlightening first to see how modernism, in general, related to people. Critics claim that, to modernism, the needs of the social system “were more important than the needs of those human beings propping up that system”. As a result, the modernist progress seemed to create more problems for people than it actually solved -alienation, anomie, and bureaucracy were all signs of a system that controlled people and created a world in which they had very little say (recall, similarly, standardized houses with fixed furniture, which didn’t allow much space for personalization of homes). Post-modernism would therefore be seen as a reaction to this process.[6]

I shall briefly examine two cases of post-war urban plans to examine how modernism related to the people it supposedly worked for the sake of. The first is Robert Moses’s urban renewal plans for New York, which faced great resistance -most notably from Jane Jacobs, as people would be forced out of their homes and parks would be removed for the sake of more efficient transportation, all in the name of progress. When asked about the resentment his urban plans faced, Moses responded by saying: “I don’t honestly believe that -considering the large numbers of people we’ve had to move out of the way of public housing and another public improvement- we’ve done any substantial amount of harm. There must be people who are discommoded, inconvenienced, or call it what you will, on the old theory that you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.” Jacobs describes that when she would bring up issues of cities and neighborhoods losing their livelihood after urban renewal plans -which were imposed from above by authorities- to the planners responsible for them, she would get a lot of alibis, boiling up to "people are stupid, they don't do what they're supposed to do".[7]

The second example is T. Dan Smith’s urban renewal plans for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, which were part of a larger excitement for three-dimensional cities. Smith aimed to make Newcastle the “Brasilia of the north” and envisioned a “streets in the sky” city, where the car would be introduced to the city and formed the main means of transportation, and where people would be taken off the streets and into the air, moving via pedestrian bridges. Faced with accessibility and security issues, the projects soon were abandoned. They are now criticized for creating illegible spaces that disorient pedestrians[8] and to have imposed top-down planning as well[9]. Brasilia, the role model for T. Dan Smith, is itself highly criticized by architects like Jan Gehl, as an exemplar “bird-eye view planning” city with no sense of human scale.

Modernist architecture started off aiming to solve people’s living conditions and ended up, in effect, pushing them to the side in favor of the automobile and technology. One would expect then modernist architecture to not be much popular among the masses,[10] and indeed, the "sort of sensitivity to what touches the heart of the person is far too rare in modern architecture", as some critics have noticed.[11]

The End of Modernism?

If post-modernism was a response to modernism’s rationalizing processes, then it will make sense if post-modern architecture arouse, at least in part, as a humane response to modernism’s ideals. Starting with social studies like Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City (1960), and Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), a great deal of architectural and urban literature exploring the relationship between the built and the humane emerged in the 1960s. At the same time, social and psychological research started emerging and forming a new field of environmental psychology.[12]

Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture(1966) is usually seen as the first major architectural work rejecting modernism. Venturi argued that ornament and even humor had a place in architecture – a clear rejection of the efficiency and functionality of classical modernist architects. Some architectural historians mark the year 1968 as the breaking point for modernism, as the benign hopes of modernity and progress lay fractured in the face of underwhelming social and political upheavals worldwide.[13]It was in 1968 as well that Henri Lefebvre introduced the concept of “right to the city”, stirring a new movement to re-claim the city as a place for life, detached from the effects of commodification and capitalism over social interaction.[14]

Meanwhile, several architects and planners were starting to investigate human-friendly architecture. Projects such as the Byker Wall (1971) by Ralph Erskine could be considered breaking points with modernism. But it was the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe towers in 1972 that was famously heralded by Charles Jencks to be “the end of modernism” -that is, the ultimate failure of modernist architecture to fulfill its ambitions.

Post-modernism and the Future of Humane Architecture.

It would be an exaggeration to claim that modernist architecture has actually died out. The industrial thirst for efficiency and the modernist craving for rationalization is far from gone. However, the recent decades have seen the rise of more human- and eco-friendly architecture schools such as modern vernacular, phenomenological architecture, and so-called democratic architecture; needless to say the growing awareness of the need for sustainable and green architecture. Many architects and planners have understood how deeply intertwined the social and the environment are.

In addition, new forms of planning have appeared that give people more sociable environments - new forms of community housing (Co-housing) are starting to take hold in Europe; and are primarily meant to overcome the social shortcomings of modern urban planning. An emphasis on street life, greenery, and the human scale is also clearly visible in many contemporary urban schemes, such as Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway or Aarhus’s Israel Square.

It is indeed hard to define or delineate post-modernity or post-modernism, and even harder to speculate as to where it is heading. However, there exists a greater awareness nowadays of the shortcomings of the modernist ideals of 20th-century architecture. Similar to how modernity tried to elevate the status of human beings but ended up alienating them in a disenchanted reality, modernist architecture started off with grand ambitions to elevate the people’s living conditions but ended up alienating them in disenchanted environments. The future of humane architecture might as well be dependent on finding a new balanced paradigm to work through worldwide.

AUTHOR

ZIYAD HASANIN

Ziyad Hasanin is an architecture graduate from Newcastle University. He is interested in the way architecture interacts with society on the personal, social, and political levels.

References:

[1]Miles, S. (2001) Social theory in the real world. London: Sage. p.104 [2]Rowe, H.A., (2011). The rise and fall of modernist architecture. Inquiries Journal, 3(04). [3]Schloeder, Steven J (1998) A Return to Humane Architecture. The Intercollegiate review. 34 (1), 20. [4]Rowe, H.A., (2011). The rise and fall of modernist architecture. Inquiries Journal, 3(04) [5] Coleman, Nathaniel (2012) Utopia and modern architecture? Arq (London, England). 16 (4), 339–348. [6]Miles, S. (2001) Social theory in the real world. London: Sage. p.84 [7]Citizen Jane: Battle for the City. 2016. [film] Directed by M. Tyrnauer. USA. [8]Whitney, K., 2017. 'A brave new world': what happened to Newcastle's dream for a vertical city?. The Guardian, [online] Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/feb/07/brave-new-world-newcastle-dream-for-vertical-city>. [9]Murphy, D., 2016. Notopia: The fall of streets in the sky. The Architectural Review, [online] Available at: <https://www.architectural-review.com/archive/notopia-archive/notopia-the-fall-of-streets-in-the-sky>. [10]Mallgrave, H.F. & Goodman, D. (2011) An Introduction to Architectural Theory: 1968 to the Present. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. p. 7 [11]Schloeder, Steven J (1998) A Return to Humane Architecture. The Intercollegiate review. 34 (1), 20. [12] Steg, Linda, de Groot, Judith I. M & van den Berg, Agnes E (2019) Environmental Psychology. Newark: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. p.4 [13]Mallgrave, H.F. & Goodman, D. (2011) An Introduction to Architectural Theory: 1968 to the Present. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. p. 13. [14] Harvey, David (2008) The right to the city. New Left review. (53), 23.

Disenchanted Architecture: Modernism and the Humane

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