Modernity I

"Happy are those ages", said Georg Lukács, "when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths--ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars. Everything in such ages is new and yet familiar, full of adventure and yet their own." The world and the self are distinct but never strangers, every action feels complete in sense and for the senses, reason and experience are one.

Modernity, on the other hand, is an age of separations. Never has the world been so densely connected, so thoroughly humanized, so artificially ours; yet even the objects and institutions of our making appear abstracted from human experience, like impersonal facts of nature. For Lukács, modernity signalled this historical loss of totality, a severance between the individual and the universal that art should attempt to (re)mediate. In this wishful reconciliation, modern art would become "the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God."

While the hero of premodern literature had represented an inherited organic whole, the hero of the modern metropolis is solitary, in opposition to his setting and spiritually homeless. Odysseus stood for, and with, Ithaca; Baudelaire stands for, and by, himself--even as he strolls through the Parisian crowds. One was guided by gods, the other by demons. So, too, stands the architectural object. Severed from the totality of the city, it must set forth to "prove its soul" in the emptiness of the world. Premodern architecture had totality as a given, the modern object seeks totality as an aim.

This course maps the history of architectural modernity by tracing the adventures of the solitary object as it mourns the gradual loss of the city. Each class pairs an architect with a concept of mediation, spanning the nascent metropolis of the nineteenth century to the Fordist city of the interwar period. The sequence is organized into four trilogies: Bourgeois Monuments, Industrial Arcades, Romantic Gardens and Urban Assembly Lines. The second part of this course, covering the postwar period until 2008, or postmodernity, will be offered in next academic year.

NOTE: This is Part I of two alternating courses: Modernity I (AR-510) and Modernity II. Modernity I: From Bourgeois Metropolis to Fordist City, will take place in the fall semester of 2026. Modernity II: From City-territory to Technofeudalism, will take place in the fall semester of 2027. The two new courses replace the previously unified module AR-505 Modernity, Architecture and the Environment.

Sessions

Modernity I: From Bourgeois Metropolis to Fordist City

I. Bourgeois Monuments
1. Ledoux, or the Primitive Hut
2. Nash, or the Boulevard
3. Schinkel, or the Pavilion

II. Industrial Arcades
4. Paxton, or the Conservatory
5. Viollet-Le-Duc, or the Skeleton
6. Semper, or the Cladding

III. Romantic Gardens
7. Morris, or the Artisan Cottage
8. Geddes, or the Valley Section
9. Wright, or the Prairie Bungalow

IV. Assembly Lines
10. Taut, or the City Crown
11. Gizburg, or the Social Condenser
12. Mies, or the Skyscraper