| This dissertation attempts to map and subsequently critique certain ideas in the dialectic of modernity and architecture in order to reveal the way in which the political, social and cultural realities of (mostly Western) modernity unfold in carefully regulated paradigms for architectural thought and practice. To illustrate some of the confining biases which define modernity today, I introduce the idea of Imperium. As a paradigm for thought and practice, Imperium comprises two important constituents of Western modernity: The first is its pursuit of grand utopian visions which promise a path to human progress and social coherence within certain spatial and temporal boundaries; the second constituent is an autonomous, self-regulating consciousness, which is free from the constraints of tradition, and empowered to pursue authentic experience, spontaneous expression, and the unfettered gratification of all its urges, creative and carnal, to the exclusion of all other priorities or possibilities.; The generative process by which French-Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi produces Le Parc de la Villette is offered as a corrective critique of Imperium. This critique is informed by Giambattista Vico's New Science which lends new light to the importance of seeing modernity, not as the outcome of a foreordained historical blueprint through which the present somehow emerges out of the past, but as a practice, a doing. My contention is that if we eliminate from our field of inquiry any notion that “canons” like modernity can be established and applied mechanically and deterministically to such complex realities as architecture, we will see begin to approach historical development as the outcome of the acts of a persistent (albeit inconsistent) humanity, and we will begin to approach a different logic of progress. |
