WHY OR HOW?

George Orwell's "Animal Farm", 1945

The modern understanding of mankind brought a strong concept: every man is equal. From the French Revolution onwards, the ideal of liberty, fraternity and equality permeated the development of our society. Although philosophically sound, architecturally these concepts begin a new internal revolution: since every man is equal, definitions of individuality, personalization and self-satisfaction were relegated to a place “outside our modern world”.

Technological advances were the fuel to this acceptance: from the internal combustion motors to the production line, mass production led to mass consumption, homogenizing the outcome for the sake of efficiency. In America: A Soviet Ideal, Jean-Louis Cohen touched upon the adoption of the “scientific system” as a measurement of man’s production, based on methods developed by Frederick Taylor. This same technology were the single clear means to justify a new architecture (just think about Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and the Bauhaus manifestos of the early 20th Century). Since then, the connection was made: to be modern, efficient and progressive, we must be the same.

My point is that, following this ideology, meaning and symbolism were lost in architecture, in favor of a tendency to reinforce technocratic-mediocre assumptions. The house ceased being a home and turned into a machine, but apart from what Banham and Benjamin predicted, our contemporary society is not weighted by its function-like standards, but by the reasons we do what we do. Efficiency was replaced by Efficacy. Architecture must accompany.