The latest on Moderism
Our speaker this month was the erudite Luca Jellinek, delivering part two of his overview of modernism in architecture. Part one, back in June of last year, addressed various proto-modern developments in the late 19th century, while this sequel approached the full flowering of modernist theory and practice in the 20th century. His thrust was to show how many different schools or strands there were which might come under the "modernist" umbrella, how they related to one another and how they differed. For example, while most of us might think of Art Deco as "modern" in the abstraction and streamlining of its decoration, others under the modernist banner decried ALL ornamentation—including one who wrote that all decoration is the mark of the savage and anyone with a tattoo was either an actual or a latent criminal. Luca covered the way that the development of materials affected design (and the extent to which it was felt that the structure and building techniques should be hidden or openly displayed) right up to recent designs that would not have been technically possible without computer-aided design. Many thanks to Luca for a thorough and scholarly exploration. Apologies to those who attempted to watch the livestream, which did not work, but you can see a high-res video of the whole talk on our YouTube channel at https://youtu.be/yFntbH6GWb8. You can see still photos from the evening at www.flickr.com/photos/sheridanclub/albums/72177720315303292.
