The Eternal Modern
Every place seems to resemble its golden age. Last January, I visited Miami Beach, where the dominant style is art deco. Last spring, I visited Palm Springs, where the style is midcentury modern. In the fall, I visited Prague, Budapest and Vienna, which are full of art nouveau buildings. At one time, all those styles were modern. But I would argue that midcentury modern is different, a sort of eternal modern. The end of the road, or at least the end of a very important road.
It’s been said that all art is modern art. At the time, Renaissance painting was recognized as modern. Ruskin wrote about “modern artists” like Turner. Art nouveau can be roughly translated as modern art. So why do I think mid-century modern is different?
Even when I was young (in the 1960s), art nouveau architecture looked old fashioned. In contrast, buildings designed by Mies van der Rohe still look right up to date, even though we are seeing them through the same 70-year gap as I viewed art nouveau as a child. The International Style has remained the dominant architectural style. More recently, even clothing styles seem to have stopped changing. Why?
[As an aside, in this post I’m considering our macro environment. I understand that at the micro level (computer chips, biotech, etc.) rapid change continues. It might even accelerate with AI.]
In retrospect, the 1950s seem like a pivotal decade. The Boeing 707, nuclear power plants, satellites orbiting Earth, glass walled skyscrapers, etc., all seemed radically different from the world of the 1890s. In contrast, airliners of the 2020s look roughly like the 707, we seem even less able to build nuclear power plants than in the 1960s, we seem to have a harder time getting back to the moon than going the first time, and we still build boring glass walled skyscrapers.
Now think about art. Abstract expressionism seems radically different from the painting styles of the nineteenth century. But it also represented the end of a road, the end of visual experimentation. Art had been moving toward abstraction for a long time, and once it arrived there was no place to go in a visual sense. After the 1950s, the important innovations in painting were ideas, not visual styles. And since there are an infinite number of possible ideas, there is no dominant style after abstract expressionism.
[Yes, abstraction was first developed in the 1910s, but the 1950s is when it became the dominant style.]
So both engineers and artists ran out of ideas at about the same time. More specifically, engineers ran out of macro ideas, and artists ran out of ideas for visual experimentation.
In architecture, technology can drive changes in style. The steel framed, glass walled skyscraper was perhaps the most important technological innovation in the history of building, and its aesthetic possibilities were discovered almost immediately. It’s true that computer design has allowed further innovations, including the work of Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid, but for every one of their postmodern buildings, we continue to build a hundred Mies van der Rohe buildings. (Just as the mannerist painters didn’t deflect art from the course set in the Renaissance.) At the macro level, we still live in a mid-century modern world; the world of The Jetsons never happened. Corporations still put 1950s-style abstract paintings on the walls of their 1950s-style office buildings.
In another sense, however, we have rejected the modernism of the 1950s. The optimistic, can do attitude toward rapid change has been replaced by a decadent environmentalism. I recently came across an old Life magazine article that perfectly encapsulated the sort of midcentury modern optimism that has not endured. It described plans to build a fantastic airport on the west side of Manhattan.
Wow!!!
Love that price tag!
You probably thought I was stacking the deck by contrasting phrases like “Optimistic can do attitude” and “decadence”. But why would you assume that I view decadence as a bad thing? After all, the 1970s is my favorite decade. And even a confirmed YIMBY like Matt Yglesias would probably disapprove of this airport project.
For better or worse, during the 1970s the US and Europe decided to end their headlong rush toward growth. But in stopping growth, we also stopped (macro) change. And we need to change in order to address problems like global warming. Hence progressives have recently pivoted from hostility to enthusiasm for building lots of new stuff.
You might see all this as just boomer nostalgia for the 1960s, for the period of my youth. The golden age of pop music and the golden age of film. That’s clearly a part of this post. My visit to Palm Springs triggered an overwhelming sense of nostalgia. It made me recall a time when the future seemed bright. (Slim Aarons’s iconic photo of the Kaufmann house is perhaps the best way of grasping the mid-century modern aesthetic.)
But I continue to believe that the middle of the 20th century really was special. For instance, if you look at a 10,000 year graph of world population growth rates, they are mostly just above zero, and then soar to a peak of 2.1% in the mid-1960s, before plunging much lower. (The dotted line.) I suspect that the world will never get back to 2% population growth—the 1960s was a very special period. I also suspect that we’ll never again see our macro environment change so rapidly. (I’m not ruling out rapid (micro) technological change, which depends on how AI plays out.)
When we return to the moon at some point in the future, it won’t seem as special as the 1969 moon landing. Abstract expressionism will probably end up being the final example of a recognizable style of painting, from a time when people still believed that art was progressing.
When I was young, a 94-year old chair (from the 1870s) looked like a Victorian antique. Now a 94-year old chair looks completely modern, and always will look modern.
The eternal modern:
PS. I recently saw an photo essay about Shanghai at the “turn of the century”, which the author called its “Golden Age”. For people of my generation, that phrase always meant the period around 1900. Then I saw the first picture, and it certainly looked like Shanghai from far back in history. But in this case the “turn of the century” was 2000. China’s development is so recent their “modern times” are right now.
PPS. I don’t believe old people have any special wisdom. But here’s one thing that young people might not grasp. An old person like me sees images of their youth with a sort of superposition. I see the images as I saw the world at the time, and I also see them through my 2023 eyes.
Suppose you are 25 years old. In 50 years, you’ll see an old movie from 2023 and notice some Tesla cars driving around. By then, the cars will probably look like antiques, but you’ll simultaneously recall when they looked sort of futuristic.
When I watch films from the 1950s and 1960s, I recognize the built environment as being from the distant past, but I simultaneously recall when it was modern. More importantly, I’ll recall the sort of person I was when I first saw that sort of building, when it seemed fresh and innovative.
I watch a lot of films from the 1930s. I believe it’s important to try to watch these films through the eyes of the original audience. If there’s an elegant art deco apartment in Manhattan and a hostess wearing a slinky gold lame dress, watch is as if you were a Depression-era viewer dazzled by what you were seeing.
PPPS. Hard to believe, but the Italians built this service station in 1938, in Eritrea:
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23. January 2023 at 21:23
This is a great post. So do you have a theory on what exactly happened to cause this? Why does a civilization “crest” and decline?
I’ll say tha whenever I see a chart of historic blood lead levels in children, I’m astonished that anyone born in the later middle 20th century has a functioning brain. Some people believe that lead poisoning did the Romans in as well.
24. January 2023 at 00:32
Wow, such an original insight! I love it. Hard to know whether the durability of Mid Century Modern is really the exhaustion of ideas or simply form meets function perfectly (not to mention nostalgia). But your argument is compelling, which makes for the best kind of reading experience. You really have a new calling as curmudgeon provocateur essayist. The best kind of retirement. Go get ’em!
24. January 2023 at 03:14
This post, and especially that rendering of the crazy Manhattan airport, is fantastic. The victory of Modern Architecture has been a mixed bag. Glass skyscrapers seem to be obligatory in all cultures, and represent a vindication of the aesthetic ideals pioneered by Mies–even Pyongyang has them. Concrete Modernism is a hard sell in the West. The sour reaction to Brutalism and the malaise of projects like Pruitt Igoe probably guarantees we won’t see a revival of that.
For heroic visions it’s hard to top the Neom projects. I don’t know if any of them will be completed but I’m impressed by the mad optimism of MBS.
24. January 2023 at 09:06
Jeff, Even by the standards of the 1960s and 1970s, I have an unusually large expose to lead. If not for lead, I might have become some sort of genius.
[Everyone was exposed to air pollution back then, but I also played with lead melting sets, and did lots of work scraping paint of the window frames of old houses—with no mask.]
Riccardo, Thanks for the support. (When I read the first sentence of your comment I thought you were Ricardo (one C) being sarcastic.)
David, Neom is a great example of that aesthetic.
Tyler Cowen loves brutalism, but I think it only works in the hands of a master, like Louis Kahn.
24. January 2023 at 09:16
Very thought provoking post. I like your point about what looks old fashioned and what looks modern from the point of view of different eras. Cars from the 1970s viewed from today don’t look as antiquish as the cars from the 1920s viewed from the 1970s. So I wonder how antiquish a Tesla will look in 50 years. I am guessing Teslas will still look pretty modern, unless there is a big change in materials science. Perhaps the explanation is simple. For any given macro thing, the pace of change slows as technological improvements slow due to the physical limits of atoms and human bodies.
Perhaps there is also a “taste” component to slowing change. For a given function, there is an arrangement of materials that will fulfill that function. You can arrange materials in different ways, but the state space of what is pleasing to the human mind is perhaps limited.
24. January 2023 at 11:36
One thing I notice about films from the 70s (your golden age) is how run down and shitty American cities look. Nothing modern in films like The Warriors, Shaft, Cooley High, etc. Even in a film set outside the Rust Belt like Bullit or Dirty Harry things don’t have a clean modern golden age look to it. Do you have specific films to demonstrate your point of view?
24. January 2023 at 17:51
Unless really advanced AI leads to simultaneous leaps forward in lots of other fields, I don’t think that the world will see another time like the 1950’s and 60’s. Mass electrification and mass ownership of automobiles was still new. There were lots of new vaccines. Antibiotics were new, as was the birth control pill, and the combination of those two set the stage for the sexual revolution. Mass affluence in the US was also new as well. Why wouldn’t people be optimistic, seeing all the positive changes brought about by science? I don’t think that anyone made a decision to stop growing or to be pessimistic in the 1970’s, it is just that the low hanging fruit had been picked.
24. January 2023 at 22:12
Scott,
attempt at an explanation of what “modern” is, feels, and does.
For me, modernism is brutal, unapologetic rationalism. It is also brutal, unapologetic constructionism (as opposed to, evolutionary, organic development).
And BTW form does not generally start out as following function. Generally form follows feasible cheapest construction method. The simplest and cheapest construction method of any era usually wins out. That is true in technology but also in biology: a lot of shapes are what they are because evolution had only certain materials and transformation methods to work with. There may be better alternatives but they could not be done with the materials at hand. Example, there are molecular “wheels” in biology but there is no macroscopic wheel in living beings. The construction method needed for wheels has not been invented yet by nature, it’s all bones and tendons and springs. And muscles can’t expand (push), they can only contract (pull), so the entire human skeletal muscle system e.g. is build like a system of springy pulleys. Seems awfully round-about-ish and it is, but there was no alternative way to build it.
In technology, it is possible, but expensive and in a regulatory way, often illegal, to build buildings in an evolutionary, adaptive fashion (such as e.g. advocated by Christopher Alexander which I do hold in high regard). Flat, straight, rectangular shapes covered in glass are cheap in an industrial world, therefore everything looks like that. Conversely, round, organic shapes were cheap in a world dominated by handmade craft items pre-modernism, e.g. art nouveau, hence furniture and buildings looked like that. Flat, straight and square are lofty goals for a cabinet maker, but very hard to achieve w/o machines.
But I disgress. Back to the main point – rationalism is what shimmers through everything that seems “eternally modern” to us. Example the Eiffel tower – not looking like Bauhaus, because non-straight, non-glass as a structure, but equally modern because rational in its design. Straightforward, no detours, no decoration, making the most structural sense with the means of the period without an iota of consideration for decoration. And just as a footnote, another Architect, Bernard Rudofsky, asked the question about fashion in 1944: “Are clothes modern?” (meaning, do they make rational sense?), example https://medium.com/items/bernard-rudofskys-1944-exhibition-are-clothes-modern-1ba461789d24
Curiously, when I was young, I was much more in favor of evolutionary and “feeling” approaches. But at the same time I also had an aversion to gratuitous decoration, fake appendages in fashion etc. … I wanted “Structural Truth” in everything. And that is what finally won out, because what I like today are “modern” shapes. The structural truth of unapologetic rationalism in design. I like all the Bauhaus stuff now. I can’t stand postmodernism anymore. etc. I still think a lot of modern architecture is dysfunctional because it places too much emphasis on how the building looks from the outside and doesn’t customize enough to the true needs of the user. Here, I am with Chris Alexander. But I have a fondness now for ruthless rationalism and all its expressions in life. Bauhaus architecture. Childhood vaccines. Freeways across cities. Nuclear power stations. The Citroen DS car. All these are brutal, unapologetically rationalist constructions. They are modern and will always be.
The 70s were that one blissful decade where rationalism was still working, but had merged with 60s counter-culture to produce a hybrid that was still rationalist but experimented with organic forms. An Airport like Paris CDG (1) is both rationalist and non-straight, non-flat. But what came later is that, instead of just taking away the “edge” and, let’s say, rigidity of unapologetic rationalism, the counter culture became the dominant thing. It won. But it is not rational, never was. It is romantic. Like 19th C romanticism, it is nostalgic towards an imaginary past. It is feeling, but not thinking enough. That btw includes phenomena like nationalism. Globalization is rationalist and modern. Nationalism is romantic. The Nazis killed Bauhaus and revived neoclassicism.
So today everything became mushy and confused in its aims because it is a lot of feeling guided by very little thinking. And now I am suddenly thinking of Camille Paglia and apollonian vs. dionysian … But I’ll stop here.
24. January 2023 at 22:40
Hehe.
The Ricardo with one C is back to criticize.
It’s a good post, but there is no such thing as “eternally modern.”
I doubt someone in 3000 — assuming humanity can get there without Sumner’s vicious, insane, babyboomer, neo-liberal blowhards screaming “Russia evil”, and bombing the world with their eyes bulging out of their skulls and tatoos of one world NATO on their arms, as they beat their chests like a monkey — will consider any 1000 year old chair “eternally modern.” Do you look at any egyptian or Roman architecture and think it’s modern?
I doubt it. There is nothing “eternally modern.”
You say: ” I don’t believe old people have any special wisdom. But here’s one thing that young people might not grasp. An old person like me sees images of their youth with a sort of superposition. I see the images as I saw the world at the time, and I also see them through my 2023 eyes.”
Um, WTF are you smoking? Of course we grasp it!
You don’t have to be 70 to superimpose images. The key here is to differentiate. When you scream “Russia communist” in 2023, when Russia is actually a moderate, democratic republic, then you clearly cannot distinguish between your 1960’s “russia very bad” view to the monumental changes that have occurred over time. America, today, is more socialist, more corrupt, and more degenerate than Russia. It also has more propaganda than Russia. Sorry to say it, but it’s the truth.
If you cannot make a simple distinction between the thuggery of Soviet Union expansionism, and Donbas getting pummeled into submission by lunatics and thugs in Kiev, then clearly you have a hard time sifting through those images.
You also fail to anaylyze these images when it comes to economic musings.
When you say that the Fed “never should have been created, but it’s here” — implying, therefore, that all have to accept it’s idiocy and deal with it. One wonders WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU! It’s like saying “well, I don’t really get along with my wife anymore, but she’s here.” “Well, the country is kind of a degenerate piece of shit, but it’s here.”
You do the same with vaccines. You have these wonderful 1960’s images of vaccines saving people from polio.
The late and great Luc Montagnier coauthored a study that just came out, which shows that spike proteins might lead to the shortening of telemores, leading to shorter lives.
Yet, you have the audacatity to promote such things. Either you are ignorant, or you’re a thug.
25. January 2023 at 00:37
Benny makes a good point about how many of the great movies of the 60’s and 70’s depict a pretty harsh view of the urban condition. That’s because it was during that period the core of most American cities had literally hit rock bottom. Crime was high, buildings were run down, everything was dirty, schools were terrible, and nearly all social optimism seemed to have evaporated–“Ford to City: Drop Dead.” Efforts by Modernists to solve the problems of cities tended to manifest as mega-projects that created fortress like architecture that would shield white folks from the chaos on the streets around them. The original form of the Prudential Center is a good example of this; also buildings by John Portman–which adopted the experience of covered shopping malls to the interiors of high rises.
This is making me want to re-watch some old Bond movies to see how they depicted architecture. I recall that he visited old places, but his villains invested in a mix of modern and classical design.
25. January 2023 at 03:31
The proliferation of television caused everyone to become culturally interconnected. I once read an interesting theory that this caused culture to ‘freeze’ in the 1960s. Thus the canonical example of a band is still The Beatles, the word ‘futuristic’ still refers to the aesthetics of The Jetsons, and ‘the 30s’ still refers to the 1930s (whereas in 1960 anyone saying ‘the 70s’ would be referring to the coming decade rather than the 1870s).
25. January 2023 at 06:54
I love the Fiat station! That’s fantastic! An icon of an era, for sure. I get a hoot out of road-tripping around my region to the old small towns and photographing the auto dealerships and theaters. I don’t know anything about art or architecture. I just find them interesting, I guess its a “decline porn” kind of thing. Railroad stations too, where they still exist.
I agree with the idea that the 1960s/1970s were an inflection, but perhaps on a much larger scale than you contend: the period capped the growth of civilization on earth and initiated the colonization of space. The moon landings were the first rumbling of a new millennium of exploration.
Perhaps it will be as expressed by Niel Peart of Rush in the 1976 album 2112: “They left our planets long ago, the Elder Race still learn and grow, their power grows with purpose strong…”
25. January 2023 at 11:24
[…] 5. The eternal modern. […]
25. January 2023 at 11:55
Everyone (except Ricardo), Lots of good comments. Thanks. No comments on the airport? I thought that project was jaw-dropping. It’s the whole reason I did the post.
mbka, When young, I preferred the Victorian aesthetic, say Sherlock Holmes’s London. Now I like light and airy midcentury Palm Springs homes. Or better yet, coastal California.
I suppose trends in architecture are some mixture of trends in art (say painting) and trends in technology. Mondrian plus the steel framed glass building.
Benny, Playtime, the French film.
David, Movie villains are usually put in modernist houses, which are seen by viewers as being cold and amoral. Not like a cozy traditional house.
Oscar, Interesting point about decades. For me, the 20s still mean the 1920s.
Kangaroo, I love driving the old Route 66 and seeing the run down midcentury diners, gas stations and motels.
25. January 2023 at 16:24
About the airport: these sorts of articles are a dime a dozen. I’ve read articles like this going back to the 20s. Big ideas. Big plans. But most never happen. Like underwater agriculture or moon bases or whatever.
https://www.airporthistory.org/kennedy-grand-designs.html
I am more sanguine about this. Airports are difficult because they take us so much space but must be close to a city. Look at Denver. Maybe these are really the best of times, despite its distinct lack of style.
25. January 2023 at 17:19
Benny, They may be a dime a dozen, but your link doesn’t show anything near as audacious.
25. January 2023 at 19:07
I’m a baby boomer, and maybe I’m more design sensitive than some, but those modern buildings I built with my Kenner Girder and Panel set look very old fashioned to me. A lot of the real ones were reclad with stone sheets in the 1980s to look “post-modern” with gratuitous ornament and a variety of surface materials. They looked very modern back then, but now look out of date. Now, the modern look involves twists and turns and asymmetries enabled by computer aided design and automated machinery. I can’t be the only one who noticed, especially with my failing boomer eyesight.
We all look at a variety of cues to tell what is modern. My favorite use of this was on Star Trek, mainly The Next Generation, where modern starships had square cornered monitors in contrast to old fashioned starships which had round cornered monitors just like old television sets. You could easily tell which starship was modern which was kind of ridiculous since no one has yet built a star ship. Even more ridiculous, years after Star Trek:TNG, I am typing this on a computer with a round cornered monitor!
Maybe I have a different definition of modern. When I watched Mad Men, everything seemed horribly really old. Look at the clothing everyone wore. Look at the cars they drove. Even the fancy sports cars, which would get smoked by a Kia nowadays, looked ancient. They probably ran on leaded gasoline. Give me a break on the furniture too. Star Trek and Mad Men both had modern apartments with those weird modern abstract sculptures on the wall. My uncle had one of those when I was a kid, so it’s nostalgia time.
Baby boomers have dominated culturally for a really long time, but we’re dying off. I’m sure there is plenty of cultural change and new generations will stop thinking of “modern” in a baby boomer frame. (Hey, I saw an article saying the conversation pits are coming back! How modern!)
25. January 2023 at 21:03
And we need to change in order to address problems like global warming.
Of course there are problems to be addressed but that isn’t one of them.
25. January 2023 at 21:50
Kaleberg, To my eye, postmodern buildings look much more dated than midcentury modern buildings (both houses and high rises.)
Mike, You’ll have to get in line, my comment section is already full of crackpots.
26. January 2023 at 04:22
That airport is amazing – love the port underneath it. The rest of the photos are great, too – a nightclub underneath the flight deck! Brilliant.
27. January 2023 at 08:10
One 1930s film gem is “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” with silent stars Harry Langdon (he’s called a “Red” in it) Frank Morgan, stars Al Jolson in a rare low-key role. It oozes 30s, look at the sharp suits at very start, all the cigs, minority stereotypes… Some fine musical numbers and plenty of dialogue in recitatives, employing rhythming couplets !
https://youtu.be/XcRSqXPWZAk
I tell the kids watch RoboCop, featuring the new Ford Taurus as crazy modern and futuristic looking vehicle… I tell them when my mom got the new Ford Probe in 1989, folks would gather in small groups in the street and stare at it, so oddly modern..
27. January 2023 at 09:26
Tacticus, Yes, I love those pictures.
Gary, Thanks, I’ll watch for that one.
27. January 2023 at 15:08
As someone who grew up in the 80’s, our imagined future was usually dark and chaotic. Which was an accurate realization of the environmental mess that industrialized civilization was (and is) producing. The big mid-century dreams are still cool but so are earlier ones, like crossing the ocean in a dirigible and docking at the Empire State building. Unfortunately, the damage that industrialization has produced is simply staggering and by the 1980’s the mess was obvious – even to children. The present and future challenge is to see if we can create an industrialized, carbon neutral civilization. If we can then we will see a revolutionary time in aesthetics and materials that will easily surpass the ideas of the mid 20th century. If we cannot then it’s going to be a long way down…
27. January 2023 at 15:13
James, I’d say that revolutionary change would come more through clean energy abundance than carbon neutral. If we keep energy production at similar levels but make it cleaner (a big gain to be sure), it doesn’t fundamentally change society. If we create abundant energy then we may finally get a world akin the The Jetsons.
30. January 2023 at 17:29
>i>”When I watch films from the 1950s and 1960s, I recognize the built environment as being from the distant past, but I simultaneously recall when it was modern. More importantly, I’ll recall the sort of person I was when I first saw that sort of building, when it seemed fresh and innovative.”
When I was 18 years old I had my first real salaried job as a sub-gofer at a Wall Street law firm, and used to eat my lunch over by the river. One summer day a big sheet of ice fell out of the sky and landed right beside me, ‘splat!’. I looked up, and it had to have fallen from the World Trade Center, which was being topped off on the other side of the fence next to me. It was softish like refrigerator ice, so it might not have had the terminal velocity to do me in. Or maybe I just missed inspiring a NY Post headline to rival “Headless Body in Topless Bar”. Well, it was an experience.
Point is, I saw those building go up, spent a good amount of time in them, then saw them come down, their spot in history will always be first-person fresh to me.
And I saw films like “Taxi Driver”, “Midnight Cowboy”, “The Godfather”, “Mean Streets”… being filmed on location and then on their first release. To my kids these are ancient documents, maybe from a foreign land, like the films of the 1920s were to me — films I watched in art houses when I was their age, only there are no art houses now. (Seeing them on a phone is somehow just not the same. ;-( )
Anyhow… as to that airport, during my lifetime in NYC there were *a lot* of bizarre mega-projects proposed for that part of Manhattan, but I never heard of that one.
30. January 2023 at 17:39
BTW, here’s a bit of interesting Manhattan architecture from right now:
Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church
“The most heavily fortified church in the world.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kocnh1RAVsc
Saying something about our time to future generations?
1. February 2023 at 11:08
Jim, Thanks for the link.
30. July 2023 at 14:07
[…] I have no idea what cities will look like in 2123. Perhaps they will look futuristic. Maybe they will look much like current cities. But I can predict the look of sci-fi movies in 2123. Their futuristic cities will look like the Jetsons. Like 1962. The eternal modern. […]