Introducing Modernism

His utopian designs for the future have now become associated with a discredited modernist dream, our contemporary urban dystopia.

Le Corbusier (1887–1965). His concept of the house as “a machine to live in”

The city could also function as utopian map.

THE CITY IS ABOUT AN ATTITUDE TO MODERN LIFE, A STATE OF MIND.

For Benjamin, the lure and fascination of modern city life lay in its surface narratives, the ephemeral, the fugitive, the new.

These developments gave birth to industrialized mass societies hungry for every form of consumer item, fashion and entertainment.

Modernity and modernism are centrally located in urban culture and the great capital cities – Paris (3 million), London (5 million), Berlin (2 million) and New York (5 million).

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) made the parallels clear in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936).

Even films made in the commercial “dream factory” of Hollywood often have a surreal edge.

“all the modernist arts aspire towards the condition of advertising”.