Modernity

Modernity

I was watching Hitchcock's North by northwest the other day, thoroughly enjoying the film, as well as the images of modernist architecture that abound in it. Twenty years after the film was released, the same morphology was still the most modern idiom, they one we were taught to respect and reproduce. That got me thinking and comparing the architecture with other designed things in the film. Some seemed rather out of sync. Men's suits in the period when the film was made were spartan and austere enough to match modernist architecture and furniture, significantly simplified from prewar men's fashions (ironically the stuff Loos appreciated). Women's clothes were closer to their overcomplicated prewar precedents, not yet attuned to the practicalities of the washing machine and the dry cleaner. Still, those early postwar women's fashions were considered pretty revolutionary at the time. Twenty years later both men and women dressed in even simpler manners, having abandoned hats and adopted denim (which seems equivalent to respectively avoiding pitched roofs and using béton brut in architecture). Modernism was still dominant, although there was widespread disappointment with its effects. Postmodernism was about to emerge, promoting eclectic, decorative forms, from which we have yet to recover. Things keep changing in ways that seem unpredictable, rendering our vision of modernity outdated almost as soon as they are expressed. Perhaps it's a good thing that we don't were the clothes or have the technologies one sees in science fiction imagery from the 1950s and 1960s. That stuff seems quite comical today. As for modernism, its redeeming feature (which is not unique to modernism) is simplification and the resulting attention for fundamental aspects of form and construction. Although it has not become the basis for all morphology, ait underlies a fair share of the things we make and use today, thankfully often without the dogmatic proscriptiveness of modernism.