Tracing Modernity

Manifestations of the Modern in Architecture and the City

Mari Hvattum, Christian Hermansen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134406388
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

First published in 2004. Walter Benjamin famously defined modernity as "the world dominated by its phantasmagorias". The chapters in this book focus on one such phantasmagoria, namely that of 'modernity' itself. From the late seventeenth century until today, the 'modern' has served as a key category by which to understand an ever-changing present. Art and architecture have played a key role in this pursuit as the means by which the modern was to manifest itself. The aim of this anthology is to trace the modern project through its multifarious manifestations, in order to understand contemporary culture in a deeper sense than facile discussions of modernism and post-modernism often grant. Drawing on architectural and urban history as well as philosophy and sociology, the chapters outline the complex and conflicting roots of modernity by tracing its manifestations in architecture and the city. The book is divided into three parts, each exploring a distinct aspect of modernity. While part one scrutinizes the much-abused concepts of 'modernity' , 'modernism' and 'the modern' , parts two and three look at the manifestations of the modern in architecture and the city respectively. Focusing particularly on the transition between historicism and modernism, the chapters offer a re-interpretation of early modern architectural and urban culture as it came to expression in people such as Cerda, Semper, Bötticher, Scott, Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers, Benjamin, Warburg, Kracauer, Mackintosh, Behrens, Taut, and Le Corbusier. For all their differences, these were thinkers and practitioners whose undisputed modernity arose from a deep preoccupation with history. A re-reading of their legacy may throw light on the neglected reciprocity between modernity and its historical conditions of becoming.

Part One

Modernity

Chapter 1

Analysing modernity
Some issues

David Frisby

I

Just over a century ago, in 1896, Otto Wagner published in Vienna what is probably the first modernist architectural manifesto – his Modern Architecture.¹ Despite its theoretical weaknesses, it was read by his contemporaries as a rejection of the historicism of the recent past and a plea to create an architecture appropriate to modern life. Indeed, in architecture ‘the sole starting point of our artistic endeavours should be modern life’.² Architecture, like other modern arts, ‘must represent our modernity, our capabilities and our actions through forms created by ourselves’.³ And Wagner’s answer as to where this modern life, this modernity, is most visibly located is unequivocal: ‘the most modern of that which is modern in architecture are indeed our metropolitan cities’.⁴ Yet the identification of modern life and modernity with the physical location of the metropolis is only one of the possible sites for the origins of modernity.

But if a modern architecture is to represent, reflect or mirror modern life and modernity, even in the somewhat naive positivistic manner in which Wagner stated it, then it must presuppose a reading of modernity that can be given architectural form. Unlike many of his contemporaries in fin-de-siècle Vienna, Wagner’s reading of modernity focuses not on the fragmentation and disintegration of modern experience that we associate with the city’s other modernist movements, but rather on unlimited practical progress and the possibility of an unbounded metropolis. The features of modern life which Wagner chose to highlight can be subsumed under the processes of abstraction and levelling (quantitative expansion of the metropolis, a quantitative conception of progress, democratisation as abstract political participation, the levelling of forms of life, the rented apartment block as a ‘conglomerate of cells’, the significance of money in time calculation and purposive action, and increasingly abstract ornamentation in street facades), movement and circulation (the acceleration of circulation of individuals and commodities in traffic systems, including the straight – as opposed to crooked – street, the circulation of money and capital in apartment block building and investment), and the monumental (the modern continuous street facade as monumental, the demand for a modern monumentalism). What disturbed many of his contemporaries was Wagner’s emphasis on a close connection between modernity and fashion, not merely in terms of the cycles of fashion but also in relation to fashion’s role in the creation of the new in architecture.

Wagner indicates the problematic connection between architecture and intelligibility all too briefly. For him, the lack of intelligibility of much contemporary (historicist) architecture lies in the fact that it does not reflect modern needs and modern life. Even more briefly, he suggests that the ‘language of forms’ created by engineers is also unintelligible to the mass of the population. The issue of intelligibility is, of course, related to that of the legibility of architecture and the modern metropolis. The language of modern architecture must therefore express modern life for modern people. With few exceptions, Wagner’s reading of the forms of modern life or modernity is unproblematical, a reading of modernity without contradictions. Nonetheless, contradictions were also present within the successful Wagner School (1894– 1911); for instance between the tendency towards a universal modernism in Wagner’s own work and attempts by some of his students, especially after 1918, to reconcile modernism with nationalism and to develop a modern national architecture.⁵

The call for a modern architecture to reflect modern needs and uses coincides with the much wider debate about modernity at the end of the nineteenth century. Only a decade before the publication of Wagner’s Modern Architecture, the German concept of modernity/modernism (die Moderne) had appeared in a Berlin literary journal in 1886.⁶ The explosion in avant-garde literary modernisms around 1890 was followed some years later by similar developments in the architectural field. Wagner’s 1894 inaugural lecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, his Modern Architecture, and the completion of the Secession Building in 1898 by one of his students, Josef Olbrich, initiated a debate on the modern which, in diverse forms, continued intermittently over subsequent decades.⁷

The Viennese response to the modern indicates the diversity and contradiction within the concept of modernity. Wagner’s concept of modernity revealed one aspect of the attempt to capture the forms of modern life – through order and abstraction. Many of the contemporary modernist movements in Vienna explored metropolitan modernity as the fragmentation and disintegration of experience. It has been argued by Zygmunt Bauman, Marshall Berman and others that modernity is experience of the tension and contradiction in modern social formations;⁸ in particular the tension between modernity as dynamic, discontinuous and unregulated movement, and modernity as a process of rationalisation whose consequence is the regulation of movement, a dynamic evident in much of the discourse on modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The notion that everything is in motion is a disturbing one, and efforts to capture the ‘labyrinth of movement’ (von Stein) through regulation (whether statistical, social, political or monumental rationalisation) helped contribute to powerful strategies of containment.

Thus there is a tension between the desire to give the modern world new modes of structure, order and regulation on the one hand, and the recognition of the disintegration of modern experience of that world (seeing time as transitory, space as fleeting, and causality replaced by the fortuitous and the arbitrary) on the other; a tension between the old and the ever-new. These tensions and contradictions are apparent in many aspects of modern experience, including our experience of the social spaces and built environment of modernity.

Many theories of modernity can be distinguished by the way they analyse the contrast between the structuring, rationalising dimensions of modernity and the discontinuity and destruction of modern life. Not all were able to capture both dimensions. A schematic overview of prominent social theories of modernity broadly contemporary with Wagner’s reflections, together with some later theories, illustrates some of the issues and problems involved in the analysis. The diversity of theories of modernity demonstrates both the qualitative differentiation of concepts of modernity and their contested nature, and suggests that a modern architecture that would reflect them would be equally diverse, calling into question undifferentiated readings of a ‘modernist movement’ and of modernism as a unified project. This brief overview of theories of modernity is followed by a reflection on one of Wagner’s main concerns – the intelligibility and legibility of architecture and the modern metropolis.

II

The social sciences abound in theories of modernisation – social, economic, political, psychological and cultural explorations of how and through what processes modern societies emerged. Such accounts often rest on a juxtaposition between traditional and modern societies, between static and dynamic socioeconomic formations. Yet an account of modernity, understood as modes of experiencing that which is new in modern society, would presuppose an account of the transitions to modern society but without itself being reduced to a theory of modernisation. Similarly, the aesthetic representations of transitions to modern society and modernity since the second half of the nineteenth century have given rise to a series of aesthetic modernisms, often accompanied by avant-garde manifestos announcing the arrival of new, modernist movements and exploring ‘the shock of the new’. The closer the concept of modernity is to that of modernisation, the more it is likely to become a conceptualistation of historical periodisation. Where the concept is closer to aesthetic modernisms it is more likely to become a conceptualisation of modes or qualities of modern social experience. A third, more recent, conceptualisation of modernity is modernity as an historical project (Habermas).⁹ None of these concepts of modernity is without analytical and methodological problems.¹⁰

There has been considerable uncertainty surrounding the concepts of the modern, modernity, modernisation and modernism in some historical periods, such as the turn of the nineteenth century and also in recent decades, when the concept of modernity has come to encompass or be fused with all these related concepts. Indeed, the common associations of modernity with changes in historical consciousness, an emphasis on accelerating change and an identification of the present as modernity, raise the issue of historical periodisation.

The historical periodisation of modernity often relies on abstract chronologies and temporalities, and on uncontextualised stages of presentness. Modernity conceived by Marshall Berman as emergent in the late Renaissance around 1500 and its successive phases – 1500–1789, 1789–1900 and 1900 to the present – relies on an abstract conception of historical epochs, and certainly contrasts with his broad definition of modernity as

a mode of vital experience – experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life’s possibilities and perils – that is shared by men and women all over the world today … To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology.¹¹

Modernity as co-terminous with the development of the capitalist mode of production makes sense only if the processes by which capitalism as a socioeconomic formation transforms social relations and experience into modernity can be delineated. An association of modernity with late capitalism would have to confront not only the demarcation and justification of lateness, but also the possibility that capitalism as a socioeconomic phenomenon may be in its infancy. Modernity as a project co-terminous with the enlightenment and autonomous reason can be said to rest on a demonstration of the continuity of this intellectual project since Kant.¹² The most ambitious attempt to abandon the connection between modernity and periodisation and turn to modernity as process in the past and present – Walter Benjamin’s ‘prehistory of modernity’ – itself retains elements of periodisation of capitalism (Baudelaire is viewed by Benjamin as a poet of high capitalism).¹³

Accounts of the transition to modernity and the contemporary analysis of the present modernity were always associated with a critique of modernity, rather than with its celebration. The focus on the present in earlier theories of modernity, and their claims to be an analysis of the present, were often framed in the context of a sense of crisis that problematised the present. Even then, and more commonly in the early decades of the twentieth century, this did not preclude the development of theories of an ‘anti-modern’ modernity,¹⁴ and mythological and post-historical political projects associated with fascism. The ‘prehistory’ project of the road to communism was also problematical.

When Baudelaire introduced the notion of modernité as a new concept in his essay ‘The painter of modern life’ (1863) he defined it as ‘the transitory, the fleeting, the fortuitous, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable’.¹⁵ The emphasis on the transitory, fleeting and fortuitous dimensions of modern experience was located in the modern metropolis. This modernity was both a ‘quality’ of modern life and a new aesthetic object, grounded in the ‘ephemeral, contingent newness of the present’ and in ‘the daily metamorphosis of external things’ on the surface of everyday existence. Baudelaire’s concept of modernity thus emphasises the experience of newness, everyday metropolitan existence, and th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustration Credits
• Contributors
• Introduction: Tracing Modernity
• Part One: Modernity
• Part Two: Architecture
• Part Three: The City
• Bibliography