The role of nature in modernity:

“The Idea of industrialization causing a pathological condition was most clearly development in Le Corbusier’s descriptions of the unreformed industrial city…He probably found it easier to apply this image to cities that to society as a whole because of an established practice among French geographers and sociologist of viewing cities as biological entities. The precedent no doubt confirmed him independent interest in biology and encouraged him to use biological entities” (Walden, Rusell. The Open hand Essay on le Corbusier, pg. 222).

Rational city: The role of technology and biology in the design of city.

Corbu’s point in his Athens charter was to point out the factors that contributed to the “health” of the built environment. He describes he variables intrinsic to balancing the city system. In his final point he refers to the “advent of the Machinist” and its disturbances to the organization of the urban. “Chaos has entered the city” and it was through modern architecture that, in answer to all illnesses, would order life and bring man health and social wellness. Corbusier’s ideas were utopian and it was through modern architecture that he would create that utopia by using an architectural vocabulary of rationalism and order. “The highest delight of the human spirit is to perceive order, and the greatest human satisfaction if the feeling of sharing or participating in that order” (Walden, Russell, pg. 225).

Religion and Modernity.

“As defined by its high American priest, Clement Greenberg, Modernism always had a irreducible goal; to focus on the essence of each art language. By doing this, he argues, standards are kept high in an age of secularization, where there are few shared values and little left of a common symbolic system” (Jenks, 23).

“In this sense, Modernism is the first ideological response to social crisis and the breakdown of a shared religion”. Thus as argued by Jenks, the modernist architect found his religion in the purity and the rational found in nature and in order. By simplifying architecture and eradicating ornament once favored by religious patrons, the modern architect was able to restablish that faith, in a vocabulary that resonated to the masses that found themselves in an “agnostic age of consumer pluralism”.

Jenks further argues that the idealism once at the roots of modern architecture, was displaced by a translation to the popular. “A social shift had occurred which only became apparent in the seventies. Instead of the avant-grarde being the minority, as it had been for one hundred and sixty years, it was- hard to believe- the reigning taste!” (pg.26). Modern architecture, I would argue, was stripped of its morality and converted to a populism of high culture and desire, very much indifferent to the beginning ideals of Corbusier and Modernism.

Jameson’s on Postmodernism – is Architecture functioning as an entity in an epigenetic landscape?