Moving Past Modernism

As modernist architects broke free from vernacular architectural languages and developed a homogenised international style, many created sterile spaces and places out of touch with the decorative warmth of historical forms of human inhabitation. Negative reactions to the brutality of Modernist spaces encouraged architectural movements such as post-modernism and deconstructivism, but these never managed to usurp the rational modernist box as a dominant archi-ideological paradigm. 

In a world swept by change from manual labour to large-scale industry and the aftermath of WWII, architects were working within a new cultural environment- with an updated material palette and construction techniques to match. Iconic figures such as Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe were influenced by industrial processes and new materials such as steel and reinforced concrete to create a modern architectural style (Modernism), eschewing the tradition of buildings with applied ornamentation for structures expressive of these new materials and construction methods.

The intended machine-like precision of these buildings have often become unintentionally humanised over time, through the addition of
curtains, colouring, or even through accidental breakage and imperfect repairs
or alterations. One of the notorious products of Modernism, large-scale public housing projects such as Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis and similar projects throughout North America and Europe, are an often cited failure of the stylistic period- the large, bleak developments often created unpleasant (and even dangerous) enviroments due to a sense of alienation that the large homogeneous developments caused. When many of these failed projects were demolished, the resident’s personalisation within pidgeon-hole units was exposed– the physical manifestation of the human need to differentiate themselves. 

There were a number of architectural
stylistic movements which eschewed the brutality of modernism, firstly and most notoriously with
the exaggerated  historically-inspired formal gestures of the postmodernists, who sought to
evoke the grandeur and humanity of classical architecture styles as a defiant
move against their perception of modernism as bland and soul-less.

 The often tasteless results achieved by the borderline ironic architectural stylings of the postmodern rebellion has motivated a later
generation of architects to create the disassembled architectural assemblages
of Deconstructivism
and the amorphic forms of Blobitecture, which blend advances in construction techniques and cutting-edge digital design tools, with
the theoretical development of a new kind of architectural detail language, spurred on by the “Bilbao Effect” encouraging the creation of unique
and iconic structures around the world. These structures are able to recreate the ornamentality of classical building (something eschewed by Modernist theory) within a contemporary vocabulary.

However, none of these attempts at
stylistic reform ever really managed to succeed modernism as a dominant aesthetic
movement in architecture, with mutated offspring of modernism continuing to
subtly permeate the field to this very day. Many advantages of modernism, such as efficiency and structural purity (form follows function), are
still convincing in a contemporary architectural context. But architects had to find a way to anthromorphise these rational structures in order to avoid the alienation that Modernism had often caused in the past.

I believe that this sequence of phenomenons
building on the successes and failures of modernism has spawned a new and previously
unclassified architectural style, Pixelism. The current generation of
architects is obsessed with difference, albeit within a largely
modernist underlying framework. 

The contemporary architectural paradigm
expands on the basic concepts of modernist theory as a mutational, rather than
a reactionary style. Architects have begun to harness the power of these
seemingly random, yet curated abstractions as a way to convey information,
identity, and individuality.

Within a similar rectilinear structural
framework, the uninterrupted masses and gridded oppression of modernist
structures becomes a celebration of difference, texture, and homogeneity.
Deviances suddenly become integrated without showing subjugation.

The monotony of idealistic – but ultimately charmless – urban plans of Le Corbusier and Hillberseimer are distorted to promote difference, although the underlying constitution remains similar. 


Culturally, we have not truly moved past Modernism. Our current architecture (refered to in this article as Pixelism), is a contemporary mutational architectural typology- based on modernism, yet embracing heterogeneity, rather than pasturising the contents of a diverse urban civilization behind staid and homogeneous facades and plans. 

These observations make me curious about an impending architectural paradigm shift parallel to the vast change between vernacular building types and the industrial forms of Modernism. Our civilisation is undergoing a radical change of similar proportions to the industrial revolution that created a new cultural ecosystem in which Modernist architecture was created, currently, into a digital world with exponentially developing technology. What will an architecture (or a city) look like if we, as architects, really start to move past the modernist status-quo?

UPDATE: A version of this article was featured on ArchDaily