The argument about the aesthetic and functionalist viability of modernism must rest primarily within the the history of modernism itself, and its own battles with competing agendas within its own history. It was not only the more rigid Bauhaus school that defined canonical modern architecture. It was an international movement across Europe, based heavily, initially, in socialistic politics, expressionist and universalist-mystic thinking. The functionalist programme it came to be defined by later, was initially a production of architectural artists, who married new technologies to emergent social ideologies. Mies VanDerRohe, for example, had no problem designing for the Nazi's, so sure was he of the transcendent functionalism of his work. Le Corbusier - had no trouble building for the Soviet, multiple curves, brutality and all.
Initally, dogmatic modernism claimed no particular aesthetic, seeing reliance on appearances and refinement as bourgeouis- wasteful, priviliged, elitist.
With the flight of the European Avant-Garde to the United States, Miesian/Bauhaus aesthetics became pre-eminent as Modernist models to emulate - partly because the rectinilear forms and unadorned structure of the buildings suited the heavily industrialized - and industrially intact -United States. They suited the instinct to linear mechanization that had become socially omnipresent during the previous two decades, and celebrated it.
This modernism, however, had nothing to do with social values and was assimilated into being part of the marketing machine. Thus it has been ever since. Even as "The World Of Tomorrow!" has become the World Of Today, and art, architecture and fashion co-manipulate each other onward into new forms and expressions and applications, electronically, across the globe.
Urban Shocker's posts often show a heavily calculated slightness of accumulated tricks that add up to a series of frustratingly lightweight, though lengthy, erroneous ledgers of particulate judgement. To rail against curves in modernist buildings is, frankly, embarassing. To endorse personal preferences for certain aesthetic models that have long passed their raison d'etre, is to be speciously, snobbishly blind to the vast emergent and exisiting possibilites that are constantly being created - and yes, marketed - within this mechanized, globalist-capitalist culture in which were are participating. The artist and the machine necessarily merged long ago, in architecture, and the both are more than well-tooled enough to socially produce what is wanted, required, needed and even envisioned.
Pleasure may be predictable, but it is never as predictable as astringent, nitpicking misery. In a city as immured in base functionality as Toronto, I'll take all the pleasure I can get, and happily, there is plenty.
