Professor Iain Boyd Whyte (Honorary Professor at the University of Edinburgh)
What is modernism, modernity, modern
Modernity. World of reason.
Conspiracy of super-order against chaos.
Passionately against Descartes.
Instrumental reason and capitalism against individualism and relativism.
Karl Marx. Everything is defined by its contrary/
Capitalists don’t like stasis.
Individuality emerges during the Enlightenment.
In opposition to technological rationality.
A world that is so incredibly conflicted.
Modernism as intellectual response to modernity.
Arts and Crafts.
An old people’s home in Hove where one wants to die surrounded by daffodils.
Italian Futurism.
Both artistic responses.
Conservatives and radicals have similar understanding of history as agency.
Buildings and ideas in developmental process.
Progressive world spirit.
History is movement.
Conservatives and radicals are different expression of the same movement. Says Hegel.
Each moment is a revolutionary moment.
This is a moment of chaos for conservatives
This is a moment of hope and change for radicals.
My brain hangs out East of the Rhine.
Time as the great driver of invention.
Society towed along by the vision of the artist.
The particular moment is being expressed.
Modernity demanded an engagement with technology.
My brain is east of the Rhine in 1900.
Trying to achieve the unattainable and ideal end-state.
If we arrived, we wouldn’t be able to stop history when we got there.
Spiritual certainty, social harmony.
Le Corb. Architecture holds the key to everything.
Fear of uprising of the working class.
Soft socialism as the driving force of modernism.
Le Corb. Architecture or Revolution. Revolution can be avoided.
Blocks that were intended to liberate were actually about control.
Dictators saw themselves as modernizers.
The city as a site of conflict between flaneur and rational industrial city.
Choice between escaping or embracing the city.
City as the place of chance, flux, despite order of planning.
Modernity as the condition which is either embraced or rejected within modernism.
Modernism is without fixed form.