Quotes About Modernism

I find the aesthetics of the 20th century hopelessly barren.

A house is a machine for living in.

Before World War II, Modernist architects sometimes had to resort to custom fabrication or outright fakery to achieve the machine imagery advocated by the Bauhaus after its initial, Expressionist, phase. Stucco masqueraded as reinforced concrete; rivets were used for decoration.

In the Arab world, there is no link between the cultural habits of peoples and the ways of thinking and creating of modern intellectuals. They are two separate worlds.

No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in Hemingway's postwar novels ever worried about the effects of prolonged exposure to the threat of nuclear war.

Modernism is an outmoded way of thinking about design: it just doesn't reflect the way we live now. It always puts forward this idea that the past is irrelevant to tomorrow - and tomorrow is all that matters. But the past is part of who we are.

For anyone who understood the essence of modernism based on and originating in the secularizing and humanistic tendencies of the European Renaissance, it was easy to detect the confrontation that was already taking place between traditional and modern elements in the Islamic world.

Because Islam, besides coming at the end of the major cycle of revelations, had had an experience of the different religions of the world before modern times. I have always said that Islam is the only religion that had direct contact with nearly all the major families of religions of the world outside of the matrix of modernism.

I believe that modernism itself is based on an error, an error in the understanding of who man is, an error in under- standing the nature of reality both metacosmic and cosmic. Modernism is based on an enormous deception, which is leading us to perdition and destroying the world.

The anti-religious modernism which now threatens Islam and Muslims everywhere can be fully understood only by understanding the religion of the civilization in whose bosom modernism first developed, against which it rebelled, and whose tenets it has been challenging through constant battle since the birth of the modern world in the Renaissance.

Man today being concerned with production and consumption as ends in themselves, has very little engergy time to devote himself to the true religious experience.

To depersonalize man is the dominant drift of our times.

I think that time moves slower in painting. And maybe that accounts for a lot of the anxiety around painting in the last 40 or 50 years.

El ideal del progreso tampoco debería confundirse con el movimiento del siglo XX para rediseñar la sociedad al antojo de los tecnócratas y los planificadores, que el politólogo James Scott denomina «alto modernismo autoritario».

The art of our time is anxious. Gone are the reassurances of religion and reason and progress. The modern world is alienating, and almost every serious modern artist addresses our precarious position, drawing our attention to the inhumanity of the world we've built. The only solace is our cosmic insignificance.

Schoenberg came to the crisis of modernism from a standpoint diametrically opposed to that of Schenker and Tovey: not with his finger in the dyke but with his whole frame spreadeagled on a board swept along by the surf of history.

his war against modernism and its worship of the spirit of the age. He restored the splendor of truth in his defense of orthodoxy and the splendor of the liturgy in his restoration of tradition. He fought the wickedness of the world in his unremitting and uncompromising battle against the dictatorship of relativism and its culture of death.

A skyscraper is the incarnate rebellion against the supposedly unattainable; against the mystery of altitude, against the otherworldliness of the cerulean.

Modernism released us from the constraints of everything that had gone before with a euphoric sense of freedom.

What has happened to architecture since the second world war that the only passers-by who can contemplate it without pain are those equipped with a white stick and a dog?

Ui: We'll see about that. Walk around, like they do in this Shakespeare guy. (The actor walks around.) ..Good. Givola: You can't walk around like that in front of caulifl ower dealers. It's unnatural. Ui: What are you talking about? Nobody's natural these days. When I walk, I want people to know that I'm walking.

In the early work of Frank Lloyd Wright - and you can also see it with Mies - they make new ground by raising the ground. Frank Lloyd Wright did it so beautifully with the Robie House. The roof becomes almost a new ground.

The paradox of modernism is, writers make the decision to work with the continuous present, and to work with... stream of consciousness, as it's called, for emotional reasons, and the main emotional reason is verisimilitude. I mean, this is what surprises people: Life is not in the simple past.

Fascism is technologically equipped primitivism.