Modernity

Definition

Modernity is the historical condition characterized by industrialization, urbanization, capitalism, secularization, and the belief in progress — the epoch initiated by the Enlightenment and still, in various accounts, ongoing or exhausted. In this wiki, modernity is contested across multiple registers. For Benjamin, modernity names the experience of the metropolitan city: shock, the crowd, the flâneur, the decay of dwelling, and the dialectical images that crystallize this experience. For Heynen, modernity's dialectic is between the "programmatic" (the functional, liberatory project) and the "transitory" (the ephemeral, the shock of the new) — a split architecture inherits as the tension between dwelling and homelessness. For Latour, "we have never been modern": modernity's constitutive work of purification (separating nature from culture) has always failed, producing ever more hybrids. Modernity is thus the condition architecture both inhabits and, in its critical tradition, resists.

Key Thinkers

• Walter Benjamin — metropolitan modernity; shock, the flâneur, the decay of dwelling.
• Bruno Latour — "we have never been modern"; purification and hybridization.
• Brian Elliott — Benjamin's genealogy of urbanization as an account of modernity.
• Hilde Heynen — modernity's dialectic: programmatic/transitory, dwelling/homelessness.

Related Concepts

• Modernism — the aesthetic movement within modernity.
• Dwelling — what modernity destabilizes.
• Hybrids — what modernity produces despite itself.
• Nonhumans — the agents modernity's purification excludes.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Benjamin for Architects — Benjamin's account of metropolitan modernity.
• Latour for Architects — "we have never been modern."
• (Re)constructing Histories (Hollis 2018) — Sparke's modernity claim via Hollis: "The boundaries between the 'separate spheres' were fundamentally unstable, and it was that instability, rather than the separation per se, that… defined modernity, and by extension the modern interior" — modernity as boundary instability rather than achieved separation (see separate-spheres).
• Ornament and Order (Soulillou 2002/2006) — modernity as the ground plan's distortion and rational re-founding: the socio-economic changes "since the end of the Middle Ages and Renaissance" distorting the ornamental order's encoding matrix — the free/not-free axis "gradually los[ing] its meaning" with the aristocracy's decline while the sex axis persisted (p. 319); "the detour of rationality" as modernity's ornamental strategy, "reach[ing] its apogee in the modernist architectural movement" (pp. 319–320); the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the moment the call to order was "felt most urgently" and "the idea of propriety… was gradually emptied of all meaning" (p. 321); and modernity's debate-structures reproducing the ancient oppositions ("Abstract Expressionism proclaiming itself as the pole of virility in opposition to the decorative mannerism of the School of Paris, the new West in relation to a decadent, effeminate orientalism," p. 319). On this reading modernity's distinctive interior condition is not the boundary instability Sparke names but the unraveling of ornament's status-encoding — the moment ornament's order-connection had to "justify itself" and could only justify itself rationally. See ornamental-ground-plan, separate-spheres, modernism.
• source-notes/qureshi-2018-spatial-therapies
• source-notes/simmel-1903-metropolis-and-mental-life