What belongs to architecture?' Avant-garde ideas in the modern movement

Abstract

The Modern Movement is often given the role of the avant-garde in architecture. Recent theoretical developments, however, argue for a differentiation in meaning between 'avant-garde' and 'modernism'. It is claimed that the avant-garde was a radical and disruptive phenomenon, which aimed at a total unification between art and life and which resisted the divide between high art and mass culture. The avant-garde is thus theoretically distinguished from modernism, which is seen as a calmer and less revolutionary movement of aesthetic renovation. This article points out how this differentiation in meaning can elucidate some important divergences in the discourse of the Modern Movement. It focuses on some early writings of Sigfried Giedion and on Walter Benjamin's interpretation thereof, in order to highlight their fundamental questioning of architecture's role vis-a-vis society. This questioning means that, in the considered texts, both authors are closer to an avant-gardist sensibility than to a modernist one.