Modernity, The Machine and The Arts

In order to write this extended blog I started by reading through everything we have done so far, not all the books, but at least my blogs, some by others and some of the articles and extracts we have read. It seems an interesting journey that we have been on; all part of Paul’s evil plan no doubt!

So on that basis I felt it appropriate to look at the idea of modernity and the machine and relate it to various aspects of the course that we have covered. Although this is meant to be about one aspect of the course surely they are all related!

I have always been interested in how ways of thinking, in terms of the arts, have come about and have always looked at the development of movements as a way to give reason for their existence and invention. So for Zaha Hadid to claim she is anti contextual comes across to me as total rubbish. I know she means it in the physical sense, but I don’t think you can really separate design simply based on its physical appearance and the appearance of things around. Surely there is much more to it than that! A good example of where we are in terms of architectural development though, add to this the monstrosity of Dubai and surely with the opening of the Burj this week everyone is thinking WTF (excuse the horrible abbreviation). How the hell can something like that be being built and opened when we are in the midst of one of the biggest economic crises of the last hundred or so years? That’s where we are, but how did we get here!

So if we are to understand the world around us, or the context in which we live, we have to look back at history, not necessarily in some sort of nostalgic trance and definitely not as if development were the only thing that mattered like our friend Faust. I see it simply as a means to understanding, which in turn enables us to move forward. I have to admit, however, that my history is rubbish despite my father being a historian. I do have a good knowledge of art and architectural history at least so I am using that as a basis for argument.

To understand where we are and where we are going is then what we are trying to achieve and in terms of architecture we need to look at society and its development as a whole. Looking at Eagleton was a chance to try and understand theory itself, but to then look at Lefebvre was equivalent to jumping in at the deep end. Lefebvre’s most important work was on understanding the importance of space and its production; this has particularly influenced the world’s attitude towards urban theory. He was a Marxist thinker and is recognised to have significantly increased the scope of Marxist theory.

So Lefebvre is particularly important in terms of gaining understanding in the development of our current social position in relation to the physical world. Understanding whether space is a product would first of all require understanding what a product is and this falls back to Marx. Marxism however is, or was I should say, a sociological, economical and political philosophy and whilst it is fascinating isn’t directly linked to our understanding of our current architectural position. It is however a link to understanding society and in turn how current architectural and urban culture has come about.

The past hundred years has been a crescendo of development, basically ever since the industrial revolution the world has gone ape! The capitalist system which we have settled in has allowed continual growth, building and building like a Faustian machine. Progress is what the world survives on, if we weren’t moving forward what else would we be doing!

What I particularly liked about the Marshall Berman book (another Marxist) was his use of literary and artistic subjects to help define what has happened in the modern age. In the same way we looked at Evelyn Waugh and his satirical story about the decline of power in British society after World War I. We also looked at Allen Ginsberg and the other beatnik writers as literary examples of modernism, even Dave Hickey, although not part of the beat generation, had a distinctly beatnik style and those guys were all about going against the machine! Whilst Waugh’s Decline and Fall was written at a time when Le Corbusier was a prominent figure in world architecture, Archigram were at work at more or less the same time as the beatnik writers, so when we look at the parallels of these different art forms it helps to define the mood and societal condition of those periods.

Cinema, being the most public of art forms, is particularly representative of its period. Whilst not always visually so there is nearly always some representation of the time it is made, whether it be from the way cameras are used or the way narratives are put together or the general cinematic style. The Fountainhead was a good example in that it was about an architect and the rise of modernist architecture. Ayn Rand, whilst dedicating the film to architecture, was really only using architecture as a vehicle to relate her ideas of selflessness and remaining true to ideals in the face of influence from others. This was part of her philosophy, Objectivism, which was a sort of capitalist agenda based on the idea that reality exists outside of perception. This is to say that the individual is supreme and that selfishness is a virtue, a load of rubbish really. Far more interesting to me is the style of the movie as it is indicative of the Hollywood of the time and whilst Rand’s intentions are somewhat askew the subject matter is still a great representation of the state of society and architecture at the time. King Vidor, the director, holds the title of longest spanning career as a director from 1913 to 1980! He must have been the perfect choice to direct The Fountainhead as he is recognised to have produced some of the most creative films of the twenties and thirties usually dealing with idealism and disillusionment with contemporary life!

The twenties was, next to the fifties and nineties, the most economically prosperous period in recent history. In terms of the arts generally this was also an incredibly important time as the foundations had been laid for a burst in creativity. It was a time when cinema especially was exploding, indeed the big studios were created then and they made more movies per year in the twenties and thirties than they do now! Vidor would have seen all this happen, he did indeed make the largest grossing film up to that point in 1925; The Big Parade which was an epic anti war World War I romance story. More importantly the twenties gave us Expressionist cinema which had become incredibly popular in Europe and used strange camera angles and dark lighting for effect. These were visually captivating movies which were often poignant in there subject matter such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari which was an anti bourgeois movie and made in the same year that Decline and Fall was written! FW Murnau made an expressionist version of Goethe’s Faust and there was Metropolis, Lang’s 1927 film about the social crisis between the lower and upper classes set in a futuristic urban dystopia. All this at the same time as modernism in architecture, the machine aesthetic, indeed the building as a machine and the mass production of building.

It seems to me that these artists and their movements were more often than not almost directly responding to the society that was building up around them. So using them as ways to understand our cultural and social development in the modern world is absolutely the way forward. As Terry Eagleton said in The Politics of Amnesia the golden age of cultural theory is past, it appears to be similar in the arts, do our buildings now make huge bold statements about the condition of society? They do but not in the way I’d like, they’re more like pop stars of the built environment, just look at the Burj!