Introduction: Modernism and Beyond: The Plurality of Contemporary Architectures

Abstract

Another issue of interest that Jameson raises is this continuing dialectic between “two moments” of Modernism, which alternate historically in all elds from architecture to music and painting, as in the early movement from Jugendstil to Bauhaus. This can be also traced in our own times in the uctuating movement back and forth, between two opposite strands: neo-expressionism on one side (from Scharoun to Gehry and Hadid) and neo-rationalisms on the other (from certain Swiss and German versions to Parametric design), with a wide spectrum of hybrid tendencies in between. Yet all of these in a sense partake of the same impulse, even while denying it, of a strong drive towards the “original” or the “new” that ultimately refers them back to the historical project of modernity as articulated by Jameson:

Here, the force of the imperative to innovate or “to make new”, the powerful and central presiding value of the New as such, has always seemed to constitute the fundamental logic of modernism, which replicates Schelling’s dynamic of modernity in its powerful expulsion of the past in the name of a search for innovation as such and for its own sake, which can be an empty and formalist fetish.