> Third, modernism was built on the principle that formal experimentation is the only thing that matters.
This is the most appealing thing about modernism to me — instead of continuing an exploitation of techniques that had been perfected, modernism was an exploration of what was possible — an attempted unbundling of the things that strike us about art like color, shape, texture, forms, frames, etc. The fatalism is a necessary consequence of this idea of taking some simple axioms and carrying them to their extremes.
For architecture, this exploration is fine but they mostly shouldn't have been allowed to use existing city centres as the playground for their explorations and in doing so ruin the social and architectural fabric that had been breathing life into these cities for generations and centuries.
Take your modernist glass-steel-concrete geometry art piece, build it in the perimeter of the city in a park, woods, or plains where nobody can see it unless they choose to travel and explicitly enjoy the sight, and leave the old streets and traditional houses in the city because they are there for a reason. The modernist architecture would have had a much better reputation had they just succumbed to their rightful position, and acknowledged that in their exploration they were still prototyping and far from having deliverables.
I'm not sure I agree that modern architecture ruined social and architectural fabric of cities. Holding up vernacular architecture as some sort of beacon because it's been in cities "for generations and centuries" is equivalent to not performing a change in say software, "because that's the we've always done it."
Besides a few notable examples of poor execution (20 Fenchurch Street in London, Richards Medical Research Laboratories off the top of my head) can you point to an instance where a piece of modern architecture was detrimental to the cityscape it inhabited?
You have drifted off-point here, which is the destruction of what is good for something mediocre or worse, as in the functionally and aesthetically disastrous destruction of Penn station in NYC (there are software analogies to be made here, if you think they are useful - e.g. Windows Vista.)
I think there is a lot of value in bold new design, and it is worth taking risks, but it encourages two sorts of copycats: the developer who wants to make a statement on the cheap, which allegedly gave us the back side of the New York By Gehry, and the second-rate architect who wants to express himself rather than serve the community, which results in a rash of undistinguished architectural misdemeanors, rather than high-profile cases.
Now that the high tide of dogmatic modernism seems to have passed, its excesses offers sites that can be redeveloped without losing anything of value.
Absolutely. It's also a reflection of the world it was created in (which is what all good art should be right?) since a lot of the Western-focused artists had to look at art in non-Western forms and what that meant for the definition of art (Picasso), as well as what the decomposition of the "building blocks" of art could mean for it (Mondriaan, Warhol).
I'm not a fan of postmodernism at all, but it's easy to see where it gets its ideals from and why it was the natural next "step".
This is the most appealing thing about modernism to me — instead of continuing an exploitation of techniques that had been perfected, modernism was an exploration of what was possible — an attempted unbundling of the things that strike us about art like color, shape, texture, forms, frames, etc. The fatalism is a necessary consequence of this idea of taking some simple axioms and carrying them to their extremes.