Something to Talk about: Modernism, Discourse, Style

Abstract

This article explores how a subterranean paradigm of style shapes a wide range of scholarly inquiry in twentieth-century architectural history and theory, despite long-standing recognition that modernism can in no way be reduced to style. It proposes that historians and theorists of twentieth-century architecture might do well to retain the notion of modernism in architecture as a coherent phenomenon, but to conceptualize it neither as a stock if variable constellation of formal tropes nor as any of the other instructive but partial alternatives that scholars have proposed. Instead, it should be conceptualized as a discourse. The concept of discourse, and the conceptualization of modernism in architecture as a discourse, resolves many analytical problems and handles the broad range of anomalous cases that have emerged in the framework of the style-based paradigm. Conceived as discourse rather than style, modernist architecture becomes both more coherent-a structured field containing a variety of equivalent strains-and more pluralistic-a heterologous array of formal practices and individual positions. The fundamental premise of the discourse of modernism is that architecture must instantiate an ethically grounded material practice that grapples with, rather than categorically rejects or ignores, the phenomenon of modernity itself.