Looking backwards to look forwards during a time of energy and environmental crises; shifts within gender, racial, postcolonial, and posthuman relations; and rapid technological developments, these articles pose a series of questions. What, if anything, can still be learnt from the modernist project? What is its potential to address today’s wicked problems? What continuities and discontinuities can be discerned between twentieth-century modernism and contemporary and future architectural production? Do we require new methodologies to be created and deployed to assess these important questions? How do we reflect upon the lessons of modernism within a global context? How can the definitions of function and economy within modernist architecture be redefined to respond to immediate and future contexts?

Commissioning architects, historians and theorists, Modernism is Almost All Right seeks to offer new knowledge and methods to reappraise the movement’s canonical and, critically, non-canonical forms and examine how its modes of theory and practice might be expanded to address the complexities of designing the future.

Too often, there is a fissure between the architectural discourse of the academy and discussion of architecture in the public realm. Type.ie's presentation of historical documents next to other forms of essays on today’s built environment argues for the utility of a historical perspective within contemporary discourse. Through this collaboration, Modernism is Almost All Right aims to disseminate a series of referenced, evidence-based texts to a public within and beyond academia appearing, firstly at least, as a monthly online article series, parallel to the existing dogma&opinion series. What follows is the introduction to the series. While acknowledging lacunae and limitations interms of gender, race, and environmental consciousness, it scopes the achievements of the modernist project as a way of both seeing the world, and as a method of acting within it.

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The expanded field of architecture ^[1]

To counter Manfredo Tafuri, Modernism is Almost All Right presupposes that architectural history should be – actually, must be – operative. Part of its vitality and its social and cultural function lies in its ability to think about and critique the past in order to influence the future. This is particularly relevant when, to paraphrase Rosalind Krauss, architecture is understood as an expanded field. Contemporary architectural production is part of an intricate globalised matrix of flows (of labour and information, and raw and synthetic materials), operating across legislative landscapes of trade agreements and boundaries – all financed electronically and super-nationally. Accordingly, the apparently banal and ordinary that constitutes the majority of our built environment – the supermarkets, carparks, pieces of everyday infrastructures, distribution centres, call centres, speculative housing, and so on – are sophisticated and complex phenomena. As such they are not only worthy of, but actively require, ongoing architectural investigation, as Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour began to highlight in 1972. That we reimagine the ordinary through engagement with its hidden complexities has thus become an essential aspect of the architect’s and the critic’s purpose.

Despite its attendant and ongoing controversies, architectural modernism – with its social, political, and technological components – not only concerned itself closely with the complexities of the ordinary in this way, but equipped itself with the ambition, belief, and infrastructure to propose solutions, across a series of scales, to the big problems it found there. Lessons of the recent past, in the range and scope of modernist architecture, can provide useful means of seeing, and thereby defining, the near future. Modernism is Almost Alright.

Theory in the expanded field

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx famously lists the achievements of capitalism, insisting that the scale, impact, and complexity of the industrial revolution and wage-labour far surpassed anything realised in the previous epochs of cathedrals, palaces, slavery, serfdom, and pre-mechanised agriculture. In a section from Capital Volume 1 (1867), the wonderfully titled ‘The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof’, he underscores the extent of this complexity by discussing what appears the most ordinary of things, the commodity.

‘A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’ (p. 163).

Essentially, a commodity is anything that can be bought and sold on the market: your wristwatch, my trousers, their car. Marx is writing specifically about cotton, (he closely studied the industry in Manchester), but through the development of capitalism, his is a definition that has become more and more universalised. Henri Lefebvre (1991), for example, discusses the commodification of land as a process of disenchantment or emancipation from all previous meanings and associations into comparative, exchangeable parcels. All qualities become subsumed to quantities, homogenised within what has been described as the money nexus. While evidently this can equally be applied to buildings, it can also be extended to ephemeral as well as physical things. Commodities are complex entities, often involving large systems whose presence and qualities, conditions and means of production are discrete from and invisible within the object itself. As Marx states elsewhere, if everything was as it appears on the surface – if, in other words, everything could be intuited – then there would be no need for science (1884). But, if you look at something for long enough and through the correct lens, complexities appear. The what and the how of something like a building becomes conflated with how it is made: its means of production – industrialisation; how it is transported – logistics; where its materials come from – extraction; the social conditions of the labour force – how they live, how they are reproduced, etc. The latter recalls John Ruskin’s dictum from the ‘Nature of Gothic’ that a central question of architectural appreciation is ‘What kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and making them happy’. (Ruskin, 1892, p. 23) Writing in 1853, before Capital was published, Ruskin explodes the meaning of architecture to suggest that an ephemeral, emotional condition is both present within the form and, at the same time, discrete from it – one of a series of complex relationships that exist simultaneously within and outside the object in the conditions of its production.

Written almost a hundred years later in 1948, Sigfried Giedion’s book Mechanisation Takes Command examines the impact of mechanisation on a series of everyday items and processes. The subtitle, A Contribution to An Anonymous History, surmises a history of unknown innovators who contributed not only to the realisation of a series of what would become ordinary objects but, also, and more importantly, how these things were made. For example, Giedion tracks the evolution of farm machinery, confirming the countryside as the crucible of technological and industrial development. He devotes a whole chapter to the mechanisation of death, analysing pigs in the stock yards and abattoirs of Chicago and the de-feathering of chickens (complete with diagrams and photographs) (Figure 1) as well as the conditions necessary for their sandwich accompaniment, the mass production of bread. From here he traces how the serial killing of pigs became translated into the manufacturing of cars in the Ford factory production lines of Detroit and from there became normalised, not only in the global making of cars in Europe and elsewhere, but as a generic system of production. In the process, this connoisseur historian of architecture, and intimate of Le Corbusier et al, reveals apparently ordinary things to be extra-ordinary.

In The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (1969), Reyner Banham provides a humanities perspective on technological and environmental concerns within architecture. The book rubbed against conventional architectural history and discourse by discussing such things as Frank Lloyd Wright’s attitude toward central heating, the Northern Irish origins of air-conditioning, and the proliferation of the suspended ceiling or floor, complete with modular tiles as a prime mover, not only in the production of offices and other buildings, but also behind more theoretical propositions. The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (2000) by Rem Koolhaas, Judy Chung Chuia, and others, focuses on another lacuna within architectural discourse. It provides an introduction to key thinkers such as Victor Gruen, inventor of the suburban shopping mall in the 1950s – based on the Ringstrasse of his native Vienna – and John Jerde, who re-invented shopping mall design in the 1970s through the introduction of theatricality inspired themes. Also discussed are aspects of the technical servicing of shopping, such as the hugely influential development of the escalator, which opened up continuous vertical flow through space; and the uses of psycho-programming, which seeks to understand how and why people buy what they buy, and to get them to buy more. Kengo Kuma’s book Anti-Object: The Dissolution and Disintegration of Architecture (2007) adroitly suggests that architecture should be understood as being essentially provisional. Echoing Marx’s description of the constant revolutions of change within capital that cause ‘all that is solid [to melt] into air’, under this conception it is possible to see architecture as simply a nexus of connections and ultimately, like the city, as having no fixed form (Marx, 1848, p. 83). As the twenty-first century has progressed, we are seeing further extensions of the field into both these broader contexts, but also re-examining previous histories with an expanded reference to the non-visual. Emily Thompson’s The Soundscape of Modernity (2004) critiques Banham’s earlier work by examining not only the architectural shift in space and material, but also the electronic inventions which spurred on an entirely new sonic world as modernism gathered pace.

The expansion of the field also, of course, extended into new readings of modernism from post-colonial, feminist, queer, and post-anthropocene humanities thinkers, from those influenced by Edward Said’s formational Orientalism to those who have developed and critiqued Donna Harraway’s ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’ (1985). Practitioners and theorists such as James Corner, Stan Allen, and Charles Waldheim called for a wider practice of architecture, capable of operating across a range of scales and complex conditions, whose output might be the definition of fields of relationships as well as, or instead of, the production of buildings. The suggestion here was the reclamation not only of territories previously lost to architecture but also the recovery of a modernist ideal: architecture as an instrument capable of transforming the human condition rather than merely expressing it (Allen, 1999).

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Practice and the expanded field

Built between 1935 and 1938, the Finsbury Health Centre by Berthold Lubetkin and Tecton is indicative of an intimate and nascent engagement between architecture and sections of society previously beyond the reach of the profession (Figure 2). It is premised on the basis that architecture could deliver, or at least facilitate, the provision of health – architecture, previously the reserve of the rich and powerful, is now placed in the position of being able to make the ordinary individual well. The scope and ambition of architecture has changed, radically, to embrace a more democratic foundation.

Also striking is another project and publication produced by the same architects at about the same time. Entitled Planned ARP (Air Raid Protection), through text, diagrams, drawings, and photographs it examines and speculates on the potential future bombing of the London borough of Finsbury in the predicted Second World War (Figures 3, 4). It provides analytical, detailed studies of types of bomb: incendiary, gas, percussion, general purpose, semi-armour piercing, and their dispersal and likely effects – impact, shock, penetration, blast, splinters, falling debris, etc. – on architecture and civic space. Against these, measures of protection – from slit trenches to the use of existing basements, surface shelters to deep excavations – are also surveyed and their attributes, qualities, and drawbacks explained and critiqued.

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Designed for public consumption, the book deployed Gordon Cullen (later of The Concise Townscape fame) to make a series of vignettes communicating very clearly and evocatively the potential scenarios resulting from the inadequate provision of shelter. Finally, responding to this amassing of evidence from the fields of aerial warfare and an informed examination of how bombing might affect the city, Tecton provides a design solution in the form of an underground shelter, accessed by a helical ramp and used in peacetime as a carpark. The form was, of course, curiously and famously, replicated above ground in the architects’ penguin pavilion for London Zoo (Figure 5).

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Of significance is that architectural techniques have been used to analyse the complex conditions of phenomena normally outside architectural discourse: aerial bombing. Architectural and other types of drawing are used to reveal its qualities and threats, communicating these things in a clear, precise way to a general, non-expert audience. Having defined the question of what the future bombing of London might look like, Tecton provide an answer – a shelter whose design responds not only to the variety of bombs predicted to fall, but also to other complexities surrounding the servicing of the facility and even aspects such as the psychological wellbeing of the shelter’s occupants, as well as its future use.

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Throughout the twentieth century, modernism’s evolving concerns continued to seek a rapprochement between developing technologies and new ways of shaping society and its institutions – through the application of big ideas. The plan drawings for the Free University of Berlin from 1963 resemble an archaeological artefact, a coded tablet offering a transcription of a densely occupied city. In fact, the proposal by Candilis Josic Woods for a radical new form of non-hierarchical university was based partly on ideas of medieval European and Islamic urban forms (Figure 6). It sought the furthering of knowledge through the spatial breaking of disciplinary boundaries – specifically between sciences and humanities – by providing an environment analogous to a city, where chance meetings encourage dialogue between individuals and groups within otherwise un-programmed space. Described by Alison Smithson as an example of, if not the archetypical, mat building – a thick inhabited 2D – it was also technologically designed to be endless, adaptable, formless: a modular system without beginning or end, a non-fixed space of knowledge exchange, as suitable for the suburbs of Dublin as those of Berlin (Figure 7).

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The architecture of the mid-twentieth century became more sophisticated in its attitude to society and more responsive, adaptive, and nuanced to criteria which modernism had previously tended to overlook such as place, site, and history. But it retained a radical agenda for remaking institutions and other spaces. In Ireland, the late 1970s mat-planning of St. Brendan’s Community School in Birr by Peter and Mary Doyle emerged out of a government-sponsored architectural competition. Birr embodies the new democratisation and secularisation of Irish education first posited in the 1960s (Figure 8). This is demonstrated in a non-hierarchical plan arrangement of courtyards, classrooms, and an internal street made possible through the application of an off-the-shelf concrete portal frame system originally manufactured for the rapid assembly of factories. Designed as inherently flexible, and described as ‘ideally of no fixed form’ by Mary Doyle, who resolutely denied any primacy of aesthetic within its design, the building is as much a political manifesto in the belief of a future Ireland as it is a piece of architecture (O’Regan, 1990, p. 14).

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Other built visions of possible futures include Piet Blom’s ‘kasbah’ housing scheme in Hengalo, 1969-73. Another mat of occupation, the entire scheme is raised on stilts leaving a free, permissive space underneath designed for children to play. Moshie Safdie’s Habitat 1967 offers a similarly dense occupation in section and a stepped and graduated relationship between inside and outside, and public and private space (Figure 9). In 1969, at a more conceptual and prophetic level, Andrea Branzi of the Italian avant-garde group Archizoom offered No Stop City, a web of networked services where people are essentially nomadic, camping between thick sectional zones of generic and universal services which look suspiciously like they belong to office space (Figure 10). In The Continuous Monument (1969) Superstudio proposes a siteless, omnipresent architecture of services where everyone is endlessly connected, apparently emancipated from previous constraints of geographical place and time but reliant on iconic landmarks such as the skyline of New York and the Cliffs of Moher, Co. Clare for the potency of its messaging (Figure 11). A polemical or critical project, it is predicated on the pervasive suspended floor tile system as identified by Reyner Banham. Also in this vein, Reyner Banham himself (with Francois Dallegret), conceived A Home is Not a House (1965) which, as is well known, proposes a naked life in inflatable bubbles – albeit one with full access to essential services such as heat, water, and television.

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Architecture, communication, and the anthropocene

These last projects, and those of the first wave of modernism which preceded them, responded to the question first posed by William Morris of ‘how we live and how we might live’ (1885). However, they don’t necessarily answer the question. Rather, they tend to re-ask it while communicating the terms of reference in which the question has been framed. The communicative aspect of architecture – the idea of the project as literally projecting a future – is of fundamental importance, as Stan Allen suggests:

‘An architectural drawing is an assemblage of spatial and material notations that can be decoded according to a series of shared conventions in order to effect a transformation of reality at a distance from the author. The drawing as an artefact is unimportant. It can be just as convincingly described as a script, a score, or a recipe, or a set of instructions for realizing a building’ (2010, p. 41).

To reiterate, architects don’t actually build anything – they communicate to others to build in what Allen (quoting Nelson Goodman) differentiates as autographic and allographic practices: autographic being the drawing as artefact, and allographic essentially communicating directions for others to carry out.

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In Charles and Ray Eames’ 1953 film, ‘A Communications Primer’, they take exactly twenty-one minutes twenty-nine seconds to clarify and discuss the significance of Claude Shannon’s treatise, A Mathematical Model of Communication. In its explanation of Shannon’s often dense work, the film uses movement, dialogue, text, and music, but primarily visual images, to engage with the article’s complexity. Of significance is the Eameses’ close attention to the equation central to Shannon’s thesis – this artefact is distilled and analysed, its constituent parts broken up and its abstractions replaced by cognate, recognisable forms. Explanation becomes an iterative process where the central message is repeated over and over using a series of diverse examples involving space, movement, form, and the relationships between them.

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These are evidently constituent elements of architecture, and of interest here is how the equation is captured, mined, interpreted, and communicated by the Eameses through the use of a series of iconic forms and patterns. In the Middle Ages, as seen explicitly in examples such as Laon Cathedral, architecture was media. To reuse Shannon’s own diagram, before Gutenberg and the advent of mass literacy, the message was scriptures (and frequently the apocalypse), the signal was architecture, and the receiver was the eyes and imagination of pilgrims and church-goers – that is, just about everyone.

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In The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo stressed that this is no more. Famously, he announced, ceci tuera cela: this will kill that, the book will kill the edifice. Following the invention of the printing press and the subsequent mass production of reading material, architecture was seen to have had the primacy of its communicative function severely diminished. When it did communicate, it was often reduced to an adjunct of language. And yet, at the beginning of the information age (Claude Shannon is known as the father of information theory), and in spite of their subsequent immersion in then cutting-edge exhibition techniques in their later careers, the Eameses' film uses communicative techniques that are positively medieval: resorting to the manipulation of form and space to represent abstract ideas to a chiefly illiterate audience. In the Eameses’ film, modern icons – recognisable forms from everyday life – are assembled and articulated to expand and tease out the complexities of a textual and numerical theory.

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This is the application of architectural thinking as a means of communication, architecture as an interface. The end-credits reveal the level of interdisciplinary creativity across art and science that has been effectively curated and communicated by the two designers: Warren Weaver (mathematician and colleague of Shannon); Edgar Kaufmann Jnr. (architect and son of Edgar Kaufmann, patron of Falling Water); Norbert Wiener (the father of cybernetics, feedback control, and systems theory which would dominate the development of weapons from the 1950s); Oskar Morgenstern (economist, developer of Game Theory); and John Von Neumann (mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, and polymath); and, finally, Elmer Bernstein (composer of the score for the films The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape, amongst others).

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The film (and the Eameses) become the medium for the ideas and expressions of these experts because, like the example of Tecton’s investigation of bombing, this is about understanding and restating a question and widening its terms of reference. While the question shifts, and the context changes, what remains is an intimate engagement with the artefact – in this case, Shannon’s equation, elsewhere other diverse phenomena. As the Eameses famously stated, ‘design is a method of action’ (1972).  

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In 1928, Hannes Meyer stated that ‘Architecture = function x economy’.

‘All things in this world are the product of the formula: [function times economy] … building is a biological process. Building is not an aesthetic process… architecture “as an emotional act of the artist” has no justification. Architecture as “a continuation of the tradition of building” means being carried along by the history of architecture … the new house is … an industrial product and the work of a variety of specialists: economists, statisticians, hygienicists, climatologists, industrial engineers, standardization experts, heating engineers … and the architect? He [sic] was an artist and now becomes a specialist in organisation … building is nothing but organisation: social, technical, economic, psychological organisation’ (Conrads, 1970, pp. 117-120).

Far from limiting its ambitions, if a central aspect of modernism was a re-evaluation of the social and its recalibration through technology, Meyer’s conception seems to broaden architecture and the actions of the architect to facilitate a rapprochement between technology, science, and biology. As such his words seem prescient of the need for twenty-first century design to synthesise such strands as a means of coping with or overcoming the complex conditions and consequences resulting from human-activated climate change.

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The German photographer Henrik Spohler’s project In-between (2020) explores global generic logistical spaces. They are captured without the presence of local context: big sheds realised within linear systems of production and flows of goods (Figure 12). Similarly, Edward Burtynsky’s Anthropocene (2018) depicts vast contemporary industrial methods and systems that would be immediately recognisable to Karl Marx. As would the photographs of Sebastião Salgado (2005) demonstrating the globalised division of labour, and the inhumanity and exploitation of mineral mining in South America, for example. Burtynsky’s photographic exploration of China (2015) included a famous image of a large structure packed with workers dressed in clinical workwear, processing chicken meat (Figure 13). If there are so many workers, you can imagine the number of chickens involved. When you consider that chickens towards the end of their lives (as Giedion knew well) are fed two thousand calories a day – more than we as humans require – it becomes immediately recognisable that Burtynsky’s work represents a snapshot of a linear, energy intensive, and destructive system.

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The majority of Europe’s salad and other crops are grown in the Hook of Holland on land many metres under sea level and heated primarily by natural gas. Spohler’s and Burtynsky’s photographs of the globalised mass-production of food in greenhouses show how a repeatable generic system covers vast areas. It is the space of the near future – depicted here in fragments but already universalised in the accelerated present of fictional space in films such as Blade Runner 2049 (2017, directed by Denis Villeneuve), whose opening conveys an endless landscape of greenhouses, based on Burtynsky’s photographs.

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In 2013, in his book Weak and Diffuse Modernity, Andrea Branzi of Archizoom called for:

‘reversible, evolving, provisionary forms, architecture that is less composite and more enzymatic, [that] surpasses the limits of building as a structural and typological concentration ... becoming an open system of environmental componential work’ (p. 10).

For Branzi and other practitioners such as Stan Allen, James Corner, and Kengo Kuma, architecture in the twenty-first century must slip beyond its institutional, disciplinary, and professional boundaries to creatively engage with the larger questions hinted at by Meyer – urbanism, the global provision of food, and the equitable disposition of energy, resources, and services.

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At the end of the twentieth century, the architectural critic and technology writer Martin Pawley painted a bleak picture in his book Terminal Architecture (1998). He highlighted the amount of research and development time taken in producing a piece of industrial design – literally thousands of hours of refinement which is then invested in many thousands of units of the mass-produced thing. Pawley compared this to the production of architecture, in which research and development often or usually generates designs which are used just once, for one single building. A fetishising concern for the beautiful artefact over the system, and the bespoke over the iterative was, he suggested, leaving architecture ill-equipped to deal with the accelerations in technology, communication and, increasingly, crises which articulate the economy and indeed everyday life.

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To reiterate, architecture is adept at projecting the future if it can find the right terms and means in which to do so. These have to be broad and far-reaching, and embedded deeply within local and global conditions, pulling together and synthesising apparently disparate forms of knowledge, methods, and techniques to first understand and then hack into and replace existing systems to provide alternatives for food production, energy consumption, and environmental injustice. This is an extension of what might be described as the interrupted modernist project that proposed an architecture capable of transforming for the good the human and post-human condition during Anthropogenic times – and not necessarily by building but by deploying architecture and design methods as means to understand, analyse, project, and communicate credible alternatives. The scale of ideas, however, must be big.

Learning from modernism

Modernism has had inherent and identifiable limitations, lacunae, and blind spots. Part of this has been a consequence of how its history has been written about and described. Modernism is Almost All Right seeks to occupy overlooked territories, and to counter and complexify Western-centric, gender, class, and race-specific narratives. It begins with a rereading of the representational and political culture wars surrounding the Brutalist welfare housing project in the United Kingdom and beyond, and continues with an examination of the work and contexts surrounding the black female architect Ethel Madison Bailey Carter Furman in the mid-century southern United States. Other essays within the project's rolling monthly programme include the re-exploration of the ‘invisible landscapes’ of Brenda Colvin and Sylvia Crowe; a repositioning of the continuing relevance and influence of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer; two examinations of aspects of modernism within India; and new thinking on the overlooked factories of Le Corbusier.  We look forward to opening this discussion to an online audience via Type.ie and anticipate an ongoing, robust re-examination of these issues with a wide audience.

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Note: The next issue of Modernism is Almost All Right will feature an essay by Sarah Churchill: '"Escaping Plato's Cave": How Photography Killed (and May Yet Recover) Working-Class Modernism'