10-12

Text

Johnson, Modernity Without A Project, chapters 1, 2 and 5;

Keedy, "Zombie Modernism";

Geers, "Neo-Modern";

Tier 1

Entering the 21st century, the postmodern succession has given way to a doom-laden, apolitical orthodoxy. This book offers suggestive readings of “the contemporary” in light of high modernity, postwar modernity, and postmodernity, as framed by the influential institutions of modern art and the spectacles of millennial architecture. Modernity without a Project critiques and connects historical avant-garde currents as they are institutionally expressed or captured, and scrutinizes the remake of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Minoru Yamasaki’s vanished Utopias, the “anarchitecture” of Lebbeus Woods, recent work of Rem Koolhaas, delirious developments in Dubai, and the unexpected contribution to architectural debate by the late Hugo Chavez.

• What is contemporary

• Zombie modernist - the living dead who design among us

• The message is the same: “I am the voice of clarity and reason, authority and progress, in charge of this family’s values.” > Bauhaus idealized and mythologized by designers… its ideal of universality was a myth and mirage, shattered by the war, politics and the demands of a consumer society

• Modernism is no longer as style, it’s an ideology: of conservatism

• Meaning is unstable and has to made by the reader. To impose a single text on the readers is authoritarian and oppressive

• We must allow ourselves to look at design in new and challenging ways, we must look for ourselves.

• Renewed interest in abstraction, materiality, and process in ways that on the surface, recall the formal strategies of modernist art and its Minimalist offshoots

• Slow gravitational pull, in both production and reception towards a less reflexive and more nostalgic attitude,

• Today's artists, critics, and salespeople fall back on the old mantra of process because in the absence of the lofty discourse that fueled much modernism, there is so little to discuss except process.

(book) Critique of Digital Capitalism Chapter 10

• Digital capitalism deny physicality - 3d printer, crypto$$$, debitcard, no physical store, self-ordering system, work remotely

• Generate asset bubbles, followed by crashes precisely because the denial of physicality that is the aura of the digital — an illusion that denies the constraints imposed by physical materiality)