Outmodernisms: Industrialization and the forgotten histories of the avant garde

Writing in 1929, Walter Benjamin’s postmortem of the surrealist movement attaches great importance to the discovery and promotion of the “outmoded”, as a forgotten tactic of the historical avant-garde and its most tangible legacy. Occupying a stance in opposition to modernism, the surrealists preferred to revive historical and forgotten modes of architectural production at the same time as they dismantled new ones. This drew into precise focus the issues of the past, the future and the present that were all inherently tied to the historical narrative of the twentieth century. Benjamin’s observation of the “revolutionary nihilism” that the surrealists had witnessed in the outmoded coincided with his discovery of Siegfried Giedion’s work and particularly his anthologies of industrial architecture. Giedion’s study of the essentially superseded industrial forms of the nineteenth century drew attention to the power of technology as well as its inherent ephemerality and fragility. Embodying both progress and decay, these relics of the past were rediscovered through surrealism and layered with transformative values that were antithetical to the utopian currents of modernism in architecture.
Drawing from the methodologies of both Benjamin and Karl Marx, Kenneth Frampton argued in the 1970s that a radical transformation took place in regard to industrial production between 1750 and 1850, dividing architecture along purely functional or aesthetic lines. For Frampton, it was the separation between architecture and engineering that was of fundamental importance, linked, in his argument, to the dialectical relationship between “labour” and “work”. As the science of engineering splintered from the emerging field of aesthetics, it triggering a fracturing of form and content in architecture where the functional and artistic began to operate in distinctive (and often unrelated) spheres. For both Frampton and Manfredo Tafuri, the unification of these trajectories came to be embodied in modernist rationalism although, as will be demonstrated, it was equally a motivation for the historical avant-garde in their redemption of architecture as a lived social artefact.
Interweaving ideas from Benjamin, Giedion and Frampton, this paper will look at the historical importance of nineteenth century industrial forms in recording the intangible histories of modernism, glimpsed through surrealism and its subsequent interpretation. While a lot of emphasis has already been placed on the programmatic aspects of industry, this paper will look at the way that the outmoded provides an alternative avenue for redeeming the artefacts of nineteenth century construction; not as symbols of economic progress but agents of aesthetic (and psychological) transgression. The collision between the “new” in modernism and the rediscovery of the “old” in the historical avant-garde is a critical aspect of architectural production in the 1920s, framing the relationship of architecture to work and establishing it as a model of production that is tied to both craft and industry. Through an analysis of this aspect of architectural production, this paper will reveal the submerged traces of the industrial architecture of the nineteenth century and its silent influence on the aesthetics of the present and future.