Some movements develop such a mountainous impact on the world that they are irreversible. Should you later wish to rob a reverse step or two, you´ll peep the movement have altered our plot of thinking so profoundly it´s nearly impossible to go attend. All you can do is try to win recent paths that have the values you seem to have lost along the arrangement.
Modernism started out as a revolutionary movement in the wake of the industrial age. It was a plan of embracing the ideology of functionalism, while simultaneously rejecting tradition and history. Due to the Industrialization our methods of building evolved and made it possible to execute constructions out of steel, glass, and concrete the world had never seen before. The Eiffel Tower, which impressed everybody beyond words when it was erected for the Universal Exposition in 1889, marked the beginning of Modernism.
Style icons like Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and many more, made luminous contributions to our heritage in the name of unusual Architecture, which also answered to the names of the International Style and Functionalism, among others. Under slogans like "Less is More" and "gain follows Function" Modernists promoted ideals like simplicity in manufacture, rationalism in exercise of materials, and functionalism in planning. Although some of their buildings were said to be uninhabitable, like splendid pieces of abstract art, they were certainly symbols of the current world.
The era of unusual Architecture is said to extinguish in the mid seventies, when it was replaced by the post modernist movement, but the impact of this epoch is collected spreading its ripple effects in the world today. Rational ways of building in steel, concrete, and glass, in a sparse and simplistic style; I´d say Modernism is detached very considerable alive and kicking.
Unfortunately, the sophisticated poetic styles of the guru´s have all but disappeared, leaving a never-ending quest for profit and self promotion, like we search for in the International Finance Centre in Hong Kong, completed in 2003.
The respond to the ask of WHY we execute enormous buildings like this seems to be: "because we can!" Modernist Alvar Aalto said about recent Architecture: "it does not mean the expend of immature recent materials; the main thing is to refine materials in a more human direction." Is that what is going on when our building glean higher and higher due to economical considerations?
We seem to have forgotten that the proportions of the human body should be the decisive factor in designing and building our houses. Le Corbusier knew precisely the dimensions of the human body when he designed his splendid chapel Notre Dame du Haut in the fifties.
However, some of his other ideas were not so sympathetic, and have unfortunately been all the more influential, such as the "understanding Voisin" for Paris. He pictured high-rise apartment complexes, and he planned to level the historical buildings of the location to the ground in order to construct this modern position of the city.
Our monolithic landmarks after the industrial revolution too often support our egos and mammon, whereas in earlier times the signature buildings would be places of spiritual cherish or places that served society (e.g. cathedrals or city halls) . "We shape our buildings: thereafter they shape us" Sir Winston Churchill so wisely said: and this idea makes me horrified about the direction humankind is headed.