Obsolescence and Progress: Radical Histories of Modernism in Architecture

The history of architectural modernism is so intrinsically entwined with the rhetoric of the new that is seems perverse to even begin to position a counter-current that lies outside of this. So vitriolic were the manifestos of Le Corbusier and others that the strategic alignment of architecture and progress in the 1920s is not only preserved, but advanced in the canonical histories of the Twentieth Century by, among others, Nikolaus Pevsner, Sigfried Giedion, Henry Russell Hitchcock and, later, Reyner Banham. Each advocated a causality to architectural modernism that saw it aligned with innovation, technology and science accepting that the history of architectural modernity was charting the endless iterations of the “new” as they unfolded in the decades after the First World War.

This paper presents a counter-position which sets out to give weight to an “alternative” modernism in regard to architecture which was fuelled by the discovery of obsolescence and the outmoded, and primarily from within the circle of surrealism. This other modernism—equally radical in both intent and scope—focused on the forgotten architecture of the nineteenth century, drawing into focus the failures of modernism and the limitations of contemporary architecture more generally. In fact, it was the discovery of this “radical nihilism” from within the outmoded that Walter Benjamin saw as the primary legacy of surrealism. While this aspect of surrealism is already accepted and arrested in the scholarship in art theory, and especially in the work of Hal Foster, it is yet to be adequately accommodated within architectural history as such, or given sufficient credit for the radical implications that are implied for an expanded history of architecture to emerge. It is only through an appreciation of this counter-current that a radical history of modernism in architecture can begin to be constructed.

Drawing from the critical texts of surrealism, as well as the reflections on architecture within Hans Richter’s radical journal G, this paper will set out to demonstrate the role of obsolescence in framing a radical approach to history from within the avant-garde. The paper will look at the dialectical tensions between old and new in architecture in the period, as well as the historical schisms that emerged between nineteenth and twentieth century conceptions of space. The paper sets out to position architecture within an “expanded field” of modernism where obsolescence and progress co-exist as radical strategies of architectural production. This falls within a broader project to unearth the forgotten or concealed archaeologies of modernism in architectural history.