Reinventing and revolutionizing modern architecture

Most people might be surprised to know that the standard architectural history course on modern architecture begins in 1750 and ends in the present.

The starting date dovetails with the beginning of the industrial revolution while the “present” always addresses the issues of the moment. The many movements within this timeline inevitably gave way to “styles” and stylism. These movements, infused with socio/politico meaning, were often reactionary events. Sometimes the result of revolution, theoretical discourse or purposeful, technological advances, they often paralleled political events.

Classicism to Neoclassicism, Art Nouveau to Arts and Crafts with Beaux Arts Classicism vying alongside, International Style Modernism to Modernism to Post-War Modernism to Post-Modernism to New Modernism. These “isms” are telling responses and reinterpretations of the actionable periods preceding them.

When a movement ends, it has often devolved into a style as the buildings produced start to repeat themselves and no longer address needs, wants, functions or the rationale that created the movement in the first place. McMansions, once a parodying, reinterpretation on an old order, serve as a good example of the end of commercial Post-Modernism.

As E.B. White once noted, “Heredity is a strong factor, even in architecture. Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.”

Modernism was born out of revolution. The manifesto “Toward a New Architecture” and book “The Modular” of architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, who called himself “Le Corbusier,” advocated an eradication of history and a formulation of a new ordering and proportioning system. There was no style, only form and space making, without reference points, according to Le Corbusier.

Nonetheless, his influence extended to another generation of architects, the “New York Five,” in the 1970s.

One could argue that Italian renais-

sance architect Andrea Palladio was also a founder of Modernism —with his 1570 treatise, “I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura,” which translated means “Four Books on Architecture”—and the development of a proportional ordering system for architecture.

Four and a half centuries later, his work is still a must-read for architects.

Filippo Tomasso Marinetti’s radical literary treatise “Manifesto of Futurism” (1909), deeply influenced art and architecture. Italian Futurism adhered to Marinetti’s idea of a revolutionary technological order. In the treatise, he wrote, “Let us burn the gondolas, rocking chairs for cretins, and raise to the heaven the imposing geometry of metal bridges and howitzers plumed with smoke to abolish the falling curves of the old architecture ...” This statement, in fact, reflected the seeds of Italian fascism.

The concept of tabula rasa for Modernism, however, was short-lived. Ironically, by historicizing Modernism, the movement did, in fact, become stylistic.

In 1988, the Museum of Modern Art show on Deconstructivist architects, organized by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley, ushered in a new dialogue on contemporary architecture. Influenced by the writings of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, this genre attempted to overlay a theoretical, literary movement on built form—not exactly an easy concept for most individuals to comprehend.

While the Deconstructivist movement never really became popular, the fractured geometry and imagery generated by digitized pyrotechnics has persisted in the work of architects like Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Coop Himmelblau, Bernard Tschumi and Zaha Hadid.

Contemporary architecture displayed in professional journals and popular magazines can reflect the zeitgeist. Today’s version of Modernism is part eco/techno and part fashionista. The pared-down esthetic suggests a belt tightening of sorts in lean economic times. Houses are becoming smaller so that there is less to heat, cool and maintain.

In some municipalities, like Southampton, size, in effect, has become legislatively mandated with requirements for building performance linked to square footage, Energy Star standards and HERS rating criteria. We have yet to see buildings that offer a critical response to the requirements of these design criteria.

So far, houses have been stuffed to the gills with insulation and run on efficient mechanical systems with occasional forays into the more expensive realm of solar, wind and geothermal systems. The forms that could be generated by such criteria may revolutionize the appearance of the contemporary home.

Technological advances have historically signaled changes in traditional built form. The introduction of long span steel, for example, was responsible for the creation of the glass skyscraper where the actual glass wall was hung on the building, hence the term, “curtain wall.”

Clients who say they want “modern” are often parroting what they’ve seen in magazines. To them, “modern” means a flat or minimally pitched roof, no ornamentation and tons of glass: in short, an updated, stylistic regurgitation of forms past.

And while there will always be, for example, iconic modern houses like Phillip Johnson’s Glass House, Mies Van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House or Richard Meier’s Saltzman House, the best of today’s new designs may well offer a critical response to the issues of our day, one that is imbued through its form with solutions, symbolic content and meaning for 21st century living.

Anne Surchin is an East End architect and writer.