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copyright 2008-2010 victor chu

Modern Miracle
by Véronique Vienne

METROPOLIS Magazine
20th Anniversary Issue, 2001 Metropolis
pages 144-145

After eighty years, there's still only one word for newness, innovation and wonder.

Twenty years ago, when this magazine was launched, we thought we had outgrown our need for the word modern. Postmodernism looked like a promising development, a way to exorcise the vexing contradictions of the Modernist movement. Modernism, we thought, could be officially retired as the single most highly charged design moment of the twentieth century. It had become old hat.

But try as we might, no amount of "pomo" irony would put to rest our enduring love affair with the concept of modernity. After more than half a century, the word modern continues to evoke a sense of wonder. In the popular imagination, modern forms are still associated with the idea that technological progress is a transforming experience. In fact, when you ask designers and architects to describe their first encounter with modernity, they conjure up memories laden with emotional content.

The age of the respondents does not seem to be a factor. Even Hungarian born Eva Zeisel, 94, who always was - and still is- an outspoken critic of the Modernist exhortation "Reduce, Reduce, Reduce," can't help but marvel at her reaction to Le Corbusier's Pavillon de L'Esprit at the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs. "I was 17," she recalls, "and I was very deeply moved. To this day I don't know why. It was awe-inspiring. So clean, pure, earnest. It was almost a religious feeling."

The first modern experience is almost a rite of passage. For Massimo Vignelli, 69, the defining moment was his first look at Gio Ponti's landmark publication, Domus magazine. It was Milan, toward the end of World War II; he was 13 years old. "I decided on the spot that I wanted to study architecture," he says. But Vignelli's father, who wanted him to become a chemist, would not send him to art school. "So I sold my old shoes and old clothes to buy a T square, a triangle, a drafting board, and a block of paper- and I started to draw."

The majority of baby boomers discovered modernity as an American phenomenon, born of postwar optimism. Michael Jantzen, a 52-year-old Los Angeles artist known today for his experimental houses, traces his fascination with modernity to his first visit to Disneyland when he was six years old. "I grew up in rural Illinois and had never seen anything like the Monsanto House of the Future," he says. "I was fascinated by the built-in furniture and storage. It was modern- it was futuristic."

Chee Pearlman, 40, former editor of I.D. magazine and now a columnist for the New York Times, got her formative modern experience at age 13, at the Design Research store in Boston. "It was like being in a museum," she recalls. "My parents were hippie, and for me the modernity of Marimekko clothes was otherworldly." The fashion revolution of the Graphic designer Miriam Bossard, 31, remains awed by the blue plastic dress her mother bought her when she was three years old. "It was modern because the cut was simple yet the material suggested something from outer space," Bossard says.

My own rite of passage began when I moved to the States from Paris in 1965. In New York I practically lived at the Museum of Modern Art, absorbing its clean lines and glossy surfaces. But what made me feel truly connected with the Modernist ethic was the Proustian scent of curing concrete wafting from building sites everywhere. Janet Froelich, 54, design director of the New York Times Magazine, has similar memories. She grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn. When she was about ten, her family moved to Queens, not far from where the Long Island Expressway was under construction. "Not only were they digging a huge trench for the LIE, but they were also creating an entire community of split-level row houses that sprouted almost overnight along new streets," she remembers. "Our house was like every other house in this new neighborhood, with a Cadillac in every driveway. Modern for me is the small of the earth being overturned to make room for the new highway, new streets, new driveways."

Oddly, modernity remains an active concept for people who came of age during the digital revolution- though many prefer to use the term in its negative connotation. "Not being modern is the worst thing today," says Victor Chu, a 28-year-old industrial designer. "Anything that's hard to use is not modern. Stuff that's helpful is modern."

Isn't it time we found a new adjective to describe exciting things that are somehow better than new? We've tried innovative, contemporary, pioneering, fresh, even design-conscious, but modern is one word that simply can't be improved/renovated/refurbished. Everyone seems to prefer modern- even though the word is anything but. It was popularized in the early seventeenth century upon the publication of the book Architectura Moderna, which featured the work of Dutch sculptor and architect Hendrik de Keyser, and promoted a new way of thinking about architectural form.

It wasn't until the beginning of the twentieth century in Europe that the word modern became synonymous with contemporary Western culture. In 1913, at the New York Armory show, the word was used to describe controversial works by Matisse and Picasso. It was linked in 1919 with the radical manifesto of the Bauhaus. By 1925 it had become synonymous with the avant-garde style introduced at the Paris Art Deco show. In 1929 it was legitimized with the opening of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The term acquired an "ism" in 1938- thanks to the proselytizing zeal of Mies van der Rohe's acolytes.

Today only fanatical collectors of midcentury artifacts insist on the correct usage of the word modern in its historical context. Even decorator Albert Hadley, 80, of Parish-Hadley fame, has no patience for Modernist nostalgia. "Coco Chanel was modern back in the 1920's," he says fondly. He considers himself a modern designer, even though his former partner, the celebrated Sister Parish, was the champion of chintz. As far as Hadley is concerned, modern isn't a look, but a state of mind.

It's somehow fitting that the word modern would eventually free itself from its own ponderous past. In 1998 MoMA was forced to give away two Van Goghs and two Seurats to comply with the wishes of one of its founders, Mrs. Aldrich Rockefeller, who didn't want an institution that called itself modern to become a historical museum. In the same way, we use the word modern as a talisman against nostalgia. The appeal of modernity is that youth itself- an emotion we're eager to embrace at any age.

WHAT'S MODERN?
A TENTATIVE CHRONOLOGY

ROOTS OF MODERNISM

1585 > First use of the word modern (according to Webster's)
1631 > Publication of Architectura Moderna, featuring Dutch architect Hendrik de Keyser
1728 > French architect Charles-Etienne Briseux publishes L'Architecture Moderne
1851 > London's Crystal Palace is built
1879 > Thomas Edison patents the lightbulb
1889 > The Eiffel Tower is completed

AVANT-GARDE MOVEMENTS

1893 > Frank Lloyd Wright opens his office in Chicago, Illinois
1897 > Vienna Secession founded
1902 > Otto Wagner creates his Art Nouveau facade for the Die Zeit building, in Vienna
1903 > Hill House chair is designed by Mackintosh
1904 > Sullivan coins the phrase "Form follows function"
1907 > Pablo Picasso paints Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
1912 > Marcel Duchamp paints Nude Descending a Staircase
1913 > International Exhibition of Modern Art at 69th Regiment Armory in New York
1914 > Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne
1917 > Mondrian formulates abstract art in De Stijl magazine

CLASSIC MODERN

1919 > The Bauhaus school is founded in Weimar by Gropius
1923 > Le Corbusier publishes Vers une Architecture
1925 > Exhibition of Decorative Arts, in Paris
1925 > Marcel Breuer designs the Wassily chair
1926 > Metropolis, film by Fritz Lang
1928 > Gio Ponti launches Domus magazine
1929 > Mies van der Rohe designs the Barcelona chair
1931 > The Empire State Building is completed in New York
1931 > Completion of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye
1932 > Modern Architecture - International Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York
1932 > Raymond Loewy introduces the streamlined form
1933 > Hitler closes the Bauhaus school
1934 > Machine Art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art
1936 > Modern Times, film by Charlie Chaplin
1937 > Albert Speer designs the German pavilion for the Paris World's Fair

MIDCENTURY MODERN

1938 > Mies van der Rohe becomes head of the Illinois Institute of Technology
1939 > New York World's Fair: "The World of Tomorrow"
1940 > New York's Rockefeller Center is completed
1949 > Philip Johnson completes Glass House
1951 > Jackson Pollock paints Echo: Number 25
1952 > Debut of Arne Jacobsen's Ant Chair
1956 > Eero Saarinen designs the Tulip chair
1958 > Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building is completed
1959 > Guggenheim Museum opens
1961 > Premiere of the film West Side Story
1962 > Andy Warhol paints Twenty Marilyns
1966 > Breuer's Whitney Museum opens

LATE MODERN

1967 > Unveiling of Buckminister Fuller's Expo '67 dome
1969 > Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin land on the Moon
1970 > Joe Colombo designs Boby, a futuristic rolling cart
1972 > Venturi, Brown, Izenour publish Learning from Las Vegas
1975 > Charles Jencks begins popularizing the term postmodern
1977 > Georges Pompidou Center, designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, opens in Paris
1978 > Philip Johnson begins work on the AT&T building
1981 > Metropolis magazine is launched
1984 > The Apple Macintosh computer premieres
1985 > Michael Graves designs a teakettle
1989 > I.M. Pei's Pyramid for the Louvre is completed in Paris
1993 > First issue of Wired magazine
1997 > Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim Museum opens
1998 > Debut of the iMac computer
2000 > The last ANY seminar