Monday, June 19, 2006

David Boyle on modernism

David Boyle has an article in the May issue of Town & Country Planning and has reproduced it on his website.

He considers the legacy of modernism in the light of two exhibitoins: Modernism: Designing a New World at the Victoria and Albert Museum until 23 July, and Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World which was on at the Tate Modern until recently.

David writes:
We need our cultural institutions to start re-examining the accepted truths of modernism. Does an international style, shorn of its human, cultural and historical roots, really benefit our cities – or does it impoverish them? Was there ever anything to the idea of ‘progress’, the modernist incantation that could justify any abomination in the 1960s and 1970s? Did it mean anything except "change"?

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