We've wrestled with modernism since we can remember. Like others we wake up each day in hope of renewing our tentative, often frightening, truck with it. At times we liken this process to a familial relationship. We'd escape if we could think of an alternative but we know we'd just feel worse without it. At times we are truly challenged, proud and simply delighted in our senses, with all modernity hath wrought. At other times modernity is a heart-scalding curse, the costs of which are incalculable. Entombment on the seabed in a damaged submarine or banishment to a Soviet GULAG became all too common events over the last hundred or so years.
A third manifestation of modernity is one in which the curses and the blessings are entangled and inseparable. Among examples of the latter is any kind of hospitalization or traffic jam. The mechancial breakdown of my rented Land Rover in what would turn out to be the village wherein my future downstairs maid Miranda was tending the counter in a tin-roofed drinking establishment owned by her parents is another example.
In architecture, more than any single area, the battle to accept or reject modernity has been as visible as it has been ruthless. As the artefacts of modernism begin to age the initial battles over it are refought. We delight in the addition of a layer of complexity to most things. How sweet to see objects that have their entire identity wrapped in the shock of the new, in modernity, not just coming of age but in need of sensitive consideration as historic artefacts. Soon are we to have an archaeology of jet fighters and motion picture sets? Perhaps we should have the Cray III supercomputer file applications for lucrative academic postings in such a discipline?
nb: The site in the photo above was initially located during an ascent by our tethered observation balloon. Miranda pays out steel cable according to our instructions and we are lifted toward the clouds. Already we are pining for the ascending seasons, summer and fall. We were seduced by the deific qualities of the aerial view about 1914 and have indulged ever since. Indeed, while aloft one windless day with only the gentle clicking of our oxygen regulator for company we realized the source of so much of the difficulty created by modern architecture lies in its near-total rejection of the feminine. After the horrors of two world wars how, why at all, would the rejection of healing curves, of flow, of grace in favour of, of ...boxes, take root? Such questions stagger the mind.
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