Meet the new boss...

MARINETTI: The past is inferior to the future. How could we acknowledge any merit in our most dangerous enemy: the past, gloomy prevaricator, execrable tutor?

In his new book Constellation of Genius, Kevin Jackson tells us that in 1922 Ezra Pound announced a new age. Henceforth, he would date his letters "p s U" – post scriptum Ulysses. For Pound, Ulysses marked a new age; the modern world began in 1922.

Was modernism a rejection of formalism, or just a reformulation of it? At first the former seems more likely. The Futurists positively revelled in their execration of the old, and Dadaists cavorted in geometric costumes to symbolise their rejection of bourgeois values. Yet at the same time other modernists were sporting three-piece tweed suits and pipes. One thing is reasonably certain though: modernism’s validation and valourisation of mass production changed attitudes to mass production, from clothing to furniture, and helped dispel the stigma of the 'readymade' item.

DADA: Costumes by Sonia Delaunay for Tristan Tzara's 1923 play, 'La coeur à gaz'

It’s interesting that most uses of the word ‘formalism’ are pejorative, suggesting an inflexible adherence to rules. Modernism in many stripes was about abandoning such rules; witness Joyce’s aforementioned Ulysses or Virginia Woolf’s experimentation. But conversely the other side of modernism was that of systematising. Much of the story of 20th century design and architecture was about rationalising the creative act into as near to science as possible. Not for nothing did Massimo Vignelli’s Unimark design team dress themselves in lab coats.

SHOCK OF THE NEW: Bauhaus teaching staff, 1920s

Despite this, the writing was on the wall for the modernist top-down model of cultural transmission. By the mid 20th century, the democratising forces of fiscal security and social mobility meant authority of all kinds was challenged. By the 1990s the web's exponential growth turned a trend into a consensus. The expert is now extinct, and the wisdom of the crowd is all; what’s below the line is as at least as important as what’s above it. 

DESIGNER AS TECHNICIAN: The Unimark team in labcoats, 1970's

Modernism remains, though for the most part it's a gelded shadow of its former self. Divorced from a guiding ethos it is left wan and austere; a line or two of Helvetica Neue hitched to whichever big company wants a lick of Swiss cool this week, as if a stern Puritan minister were forced to sell trinkets from a market stall. 

From this perspective, Modernist Formalism is truly indefensible: like a prisoner doggedly observing the lights-out curfew, when the gates have been opened and everybody else has left the building.

City limits

GATEWAY TO THE NORTH: Euston Station's lost Doric Arch

Facebook, the ne plus ultra of the modern social butterfly, has become home to a group with rather different concerns in the last few months. This group is focussed on one single issue: the restoration of the fabled Euston arch to London's beleagured mainline station. The arch, a 70ft tall gateway to the first capital-city terminus in the world, was destroyed along with the original building in 1962 by a cabal of self-interested parties who triumphed over the nascent conservation societies lined up against them. Despite assurances that it would be labelled and carefully dismantled, the 125 year old Doric propylaeum was smashed to pieces and sold to British Waterways, who used it to plug a hole in the River Lea. There the story would have ended, were it not for the fact that historian Dan Cruikshank identified the lost pieces and verified their condition was sound. When news arrived that the 1962 Euston Station was itself due for demolition a unique opportunity arose: resurrect the lost arch to take its place in front of the new 21st century building.

TENSION AND HARMONY: I M Pei's 1989 glass and steel Louvre extension

This is not such a fanciful idea as it sounds. Projects like I M Pei's glass Louvre pyramid have demonstrated the harmony that can be achieved through a sensitive juxtaposition of the the classical and the modern, and there is undeniably a mood in the air for experimentation. In fact the British, once famously hostile to change, are now at least as broad-minded about matters of art and architecture as their european cousins. The populace which once exhaled a unanimous harrumph at the Tate's purchase of Carl Andre's 'Pile of Bricks' and jeered Prince Charles's 'monstrous carbuncles' now crowd the Tate Modern, attend venues like Lord Foster's curvaceous Sage centre in Gateshead, or shop in buildings like the chainmail-clad Selfridges designed by Future Systems for Birmingham.

INFAMOUS: Carl Andre's celebrated 'Pile Of Bricks'. Copyright The Tate.

These landmark constructions, when taken alongside the success of the Saatchi Gallery and sell-out exhibitions such as Sensation and Apocalypse point to a deep and irrevocable change of attitudes. It seems that, eighty years after its gestation, the British public finally 'gets' modernism. The irony is that, just as this most egalitarian of movements finds its justification, it ceases to be of any relevance. 20th century modernism was a noble attempt to replace destructive rivalries with a new internationalism founded on rationality and democracy. Yet it's a perversion of precisely this motivating spirit which blights our towns and cities to this day — the dispiriting blank-faced canyons of 'High Street, Anytown' are a stark reminder of what happens when you jettison all vestiges of localism in favour of the international. What once represented thrusting municipal brio now symbolises the tawdry anonymity of emasculated industrial towns, where the sedentary attractions of mall and multiplex have replaced factory and furnace. In a world where the internet and environmental concerns have brought about a renewed sense of community, long subsumed regional characteristics are resurgent, making the modernist ethic suddenly appear distastefully monolithic.

UNINSPIRED: Welcome to High Street, Anytown

If the central tenets of modernism are no longer relevant, what do we call the showpiece buildings transforming our post-industrial spaces? One is tempted to invoke the ghost of 'post modernism', but that would be to summon up a whole new set of arguments. In any case it doesn't matter. What is important is that the construction industry as a whole is shaken from its slumber. Housing in Britain is dominated by a backward-looking conservatism which scars our hinterlands with 'Tudorbethan' boxes, while commerce favours bastardized modernism purely because it is the cheapest and fastest way to build. What we desperately need is more control over our built environments, we need government that understands the street is as important a landscape as the valley, and most of all, we need to rediscover those most neglected of qualities: harmony and elegance.