Paradigm Shift

All of the ingredients of merging modernist principles and architecture were already in place at the turn of the century, however it took the “service of a new conception of space” that Le Corbusier was able to see that made the paradigm of modern architecture formally come to be. “Space Time Architecture,” by Siegfried Giedion, focuses on modern architecture and it’s ability to move beyond the sole perception of our eyes and into a collective understanding of our senses. This paradigm shift, according to Giedion, could have only happened through the imagination of Cubism and through the technological insights of the engineer. Le Corbusier’s five points were set up to dismantle the intellectual surface understanding of a building and it’s facade to a new full experience through a multitude of spatial stimuli and unique vantages.
Modernism was concerned with the masses, and often the avant guard thought of themselves as healers coming to aid a diseased society. A new term “Postmodernism” comes to be in the late 1950’s and is a reaction to the extreme stances that modernism holds. Fredric Jameson describes in “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” that it is dangerous to divide these two ideologies by periodising the end of modernism and beginning of Postmodernism, in which it name begets. There is often a reaction and conflict between the two philosophies that still continues to play out unlike what the name “post” modern infers.
Postmodernism has reanalyzed the modernist avant guards philanthropic roots who have now become the elitist serving the elitist multinational companies. He seems to see this as natural as to the nature of the new economics of real estate and the wealth of multi-national companies. The reaction of the Postmodernist is to find the sublime in the everyday and to encourage diversity. The well know Estonian, Lois Khan, began to emphasize this in “Order Is” stating that the higher the order the, the higher the diversity of design. His very roots began to mark a change in the cannon of architecture as with the understanding of getting back to a more diverse human regional architecture.