Modernist Architecture: The Utopic Ideal

Modernist ideals in architecture, which caused great dissatisfaction for the utopic construct, have been frequently parodied through the prevailing elocution of modernist techniques within the post-modern context. Liam Gillick quotes imagery from microcosmic office environments which alienate the individual and fracture them from an experience of human collectivity. Gillick's Assessment Think Tank (1997) is a surgical, geometric structure reminiscent of the International Style. He installs shockingly bright colours of Plexiglas sheets into a cubicle arrangement, sealed together with aluminium frames. It is a hygienic space which heralds rational productivity as its main objective. Gillick recontextualises the modernist formula, allowing it to be viewed and deliberated in the contemporary gallery space, hence encouraging spectators to recalibrate notions of a modernist Utopia.

Tadashi Kawamata, turns to organic imagery to create an effect of fragmentation and conflict between nature and man made constructions. Kawamata's milieu is characterised by evocations of a viral disease (dis-ease, inversion of the ideal 'Dystopia') which insidiously infects the urban body. His Toronto project: Colonial Tavern Park (1989) attaches a pair of neoclassical bank buildings with a chaotic timber bridge which threatens to consume their stately facades. The bridge has a creeping effect; it seemingly possesses movement. It is visually received as a living antagonist which threatens to destroy the manifest ideal of a modernist delusion. Given the current climate of natural disaster and climate change, there may be validity in interpreting Kawamata's work as the illustration of Earth's death/rebirth with natural forces being reinstated as the authoritative institution of human life. Perhaps this is prophetic or perhaps an edition of Kawamata's own utopic ideal.