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Andy Warhol pushed Modern Art into the history books to make way for the less ideological alternative of Contemporary Art in the
1960s. Modern Architecture was declared dead in 1972 by the post-modernist critic Charles Jencks. But despite the fun post-modernists
had designing hotels for Disney shaped like giant swans, and using prefabricated concrete to build blocks of social housing in Paris suburbs
that parodied the Roman Colosseum, we have found it impossible to let go of the idea of modernity.
At one level the moral crusade that modernism once represented has been replaced by a nostalgia for the certainty that ‘modern’
once represented. It is a nostalgia that can be seen in the fascination that a generation of hipsters have for brutalist architecture and mid-century
modern furniture. You can see a reflection of that in the tribute Jony Ive’s work for Apple paid to Dieter Rams consumer electronics at Braun, and
the continuing importance of the work of the modernist pioneers from Jean Prouve to George Nelson have for the furniture industry.
Its not hard to see the attraction of design that stands the test of time. There was something special about the work of both Rams, and of
Charles and Ray Eames that has made it last. Look at the architecture of the Eames house in Santa Monica, made from off the shelf industrial
components, that looks as fresh and new now as the day that it was completed in 1949, unlike the built-in obsolescence of the kitchen
appliances, still in situ, that they had no choice but to use.
There is another less sentimental aspect of the appeal of modernity which is perhaps more significant. The social media explosion, and
the universal adoption of the smartphone, delivered just 16 years ago by Steve Jobs, were initially portrayed as the next steps in the evolution of
modernity. They have instead had the unintended consequence of contributing to pushing the world back toward a premodern condition.
Twitter was promised to be about individual empowerment, but threatens to take us back to the Middle Ages with all its intolerance and the return
of ancient superstitions about vaccines and prejudices against outsiders that have reappeared in a new age of unreason. We need to find new
ways of using technology to restore some of the essential qualities and freedoms of modernity.
To be modern is not to choose one style over another. It is to find ways to put technology to work for people. It is to understand how society
is changing. It is about research and evidence and reason and understanding. Terence Conran used to say that design is intelligence made visible.
Technology does not stay still. Modernity was once about cantilevered tubular steel chairs. Buckminster Fuller rightly mocked the
Bauhaus modernists for worrying only about what they could see in their world, the design of taps and faucets and not engaging with the
pipes and the engineers who supplied them with water. The British critic Reyner Banham even in the 1960s was predicting a future in which
furniture disappeared altogether. To an important extent we are in a period when objects have dematerialised as he suggested that they
would. We must look for new ways to be modern, as well as modern ways to find the comfort we have always looked for in our physical
possessions and their way of reflecting our lives and our memories.
WORDS
DEYAN SUDJIC
MODERNITY
MEANS UNDERSTANDING HOW SOCIETY IS CHANGING
