Modernism and The Machine
by The 20th century was transformed by industrialisation and rapid technological progress. The machine came to be seen as panacea for society’s ills. Most of the avant-garde architects and designers who articulated a self-consciously modernist agenda were enthused by all things modem, particularly the machine and new technologies.
Modernist designers were committed to the notion of the Zeitgeist – ‘the spirit of the age’. They wanted to use the very latest materials and industrial processes to produce buildings and products – steel, reinforced concrete, plate glass, tubular steel for furniture, and they were enthusiastic about mass-production, standardization etc, which they recognized as a tool to produce more egalitarian designs for a mass society.
From a visual, aesthetic perspective, their designs were generally abstract rather than realist, historical or decorative. These latter were synonymous with the past, and any attempt to use historical styles of design such as rococo and classicism was met with disapproval and seen as indicative of an outmoded form of bourgeois individualism (NB Le Corbusier, though, admired classicism). There was also a moral dimension, that it was untruthful to copy the past.
In contrast, architects and designers became obsessed with mass society and they began to conceive of the individual as akin to the machine: ordered, rational, abstract and standardized, stripped of individual traits, national characteristics, and irrational allegiances. Bourgeois individualism was associated with the 19th century, whereas 20th century man had shed such particularities, and was, instead, a product of the modem world – with fairly uniform needs which the modernist architect and designers could both satisfy, but crucially also shape.
It was asserted by some of these architects and designers that primarily form should follow function, and that in achieving this, they would develop the ideal forms for a modem society – the typeform according to Le Corbusier. These forms would be abstract, stripped of all superfluities, beautiful, sparse and universal in appeal.
In the 1920s and 1930s modernist architecture and design was the product of the activities of a relatively small number of individuals who sometimes worked together, but often worked independently. Paul Greenhalgh in Modernism in Design described these as ‘pioneer’ modernists.
Significantly these architects and designers were drawn from various countries primarily in Europe but also in the USA. This internationalism was picked upon in 1932 in H.R. Hitchcock’s book The International Style, and as a result modernist architecture has also been known as the International Style. Internationalism was key to much modernist rhetoric – the theory was that architects/designers from across the globe would develop design solutions which addressed the needs of modern man. The view was that modem man was increasingly abstract, technocratic, and his needs were more universal – again individualism was outmoded.
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