The modernist movement looked to industrial processes – factories, warehouses and silos - to enhance their designs. Their dream was to create rationalized machines for living. They thought the functional glass box could modernize everyday life. By bringing efficiency into every aspect of the city, home, and schools we would become liberated creatives and thinkers. Since then, there have been many iterations of machine-methods applied to the physical and cultural environment.
For modernists rationalization was seen as an emancipatory critique of a heavily-weighted architectural tradition, which continuously generated superfluous decorative elements. That approach might have lost some relevance a century later, but the impetus behind it is still strong: to create architecture without architects. To envision a process of design that addresses communal needs.
In a contemporary society that is over-designed, over-securitized, over-rationalized and privatized, our battlefield is public space. Many architects and designers hack and tweak the city by transforming it in unexpected ways. The in-between spaces, which are still undefined, play an important role in the creative development and character of cities. Fenced, locked, skate-proofed, sit-proofed, sleep-proofed, the city has become sanitized.
