Modernism

Aspects and Features

Features of the Modern

• Modernism was a revolt against the conservative values of realism. The modernist movement, at
the beginning of the 20th century, marked, for the first time, the term "avant-garde", with which
the movement was labeled until the word "modernism" prevailed, was used for the arts (rather
than in its original military and political context).

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih

• Modernism rejected the lingering certainty of Enlightenment thinking and also rejected the
existence of a compassionate, all-powerful Creator God- NIHILISM. (Waiting for Godot)
Features of the Modern
• Modernism produced abstract arts. Gertrude Stein's abstract writings, for example, Pablo Picasso’s
Paintings .
“Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc’d.”
• The Modernist re-contextualization of the individual within the fabric of this received social heritage.
“To every man his little cross. Till he dies. And is forgotten.”― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
• Modernist literature often features a marked pessimism. But the questioning spirit of modernism
could also be seen, less elegiac, as part of a necessary search for ways to make sense of a broken
world, in his modernist expression the artist as "hero" seeks to embrace complexity and locate new
meanings (Absurd Hero).
“A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.”― James Joyce
• The concept of modernism denies the existence of truth. According to this school of thought,
everything is relative, including Time (Albert Camus)
• Rediscovery of primitivism, Gothic, Neo-Gothic, even profane.
Features of the Modern
• A salient characteristic of modernism is self-consciousness/stream of consciousness.

“ I got 14 fevers/ I got 5 believers...dressed up like men

tell your mama not to worry/

“ tell your mama & your pappa i'm trying to keep from dying too”

“tell your mamma & your pappa that there's nothing wrong with my jugular vein
tell your mama i love her & tell your sister Alice the same…”

“when you sleep on windows & you stay up all night swallowing rocks”

“I should've sent her to Hong Kong instead of leaving”

― Bob Dylan, The Lyrics: 1961-2012
 Historic cities rarely surpass a plot ratio of 2:1
(ratio of floor area to plot area). This density is
easily achieved by buildings not exceeding
three to five floors, allowing well lit and
humanely proportioned private gardens and
public spaces. Since the nineteenth century
we have observed with each new revision of
land-use plans a regular, irreversible increase
in plot-ratios (in the City of London, for
instance, the coefficient regularly exceeds
6:1).

The Unité d'Habitation (Housing Unit) in Marseilles

- residential housing design developed by Le
Corbusier
 The Glass Pavilion, designed by Bruno Taut and
built in 1914, was a prismatic glass dome structure
at the Cologne Deutscher Werkbund Exhibition

1913 - The Woolworth

Building, an innovative and
elegant early skyscraper
completed in 1913.
“Cathedral of Commerce”
Constructed from 1887 to 1889 as the entrance to the
1889 World's Fair.
The Eiffel Tower is the most-visited paid monument in the
world; 6.91 million
“We, writers, people
painters, ascended
sculptors, it in 2015.
architects and passionate devotees of
the hitherto untouched beauty of Paris, protest with all our strength,
with all our indignation in the name of slighted French taste, against
the erection … of this useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower … To bring
our arguments home, imagine for a moment a giddy, ridiculous tower
dominating Paris like a gigantic black smokestack, crushing under its
barbaric bulk….we shall see stretching like a blot of ink the hateful
shadow of the hateful column of bolted sheet metal.[8]