Modernism: an American wake.

Book excerpt: Modernism was an aesthetic project introduced as being the single frame of mind necessary to impersonate modernity’s best invention – the scientific method – which would cure the various sicknesses derived from rampant urbanization. Therefore, it is not surprising that modernism has often been confused with modernity, which is actually a project spanning 500 years. The anthology gathers a body of notes conrad-bercah has been peeling for over twenty years about some of the cultural issues reflected in American modernism and its discontents. The material has gained an ‘archaeological’ interest for the author who aims at stimulating the reader to interact with the prevailing rhetoric of the day: a relentless techno-fetishism to mask an irreversible submission to market forces that thrive on making a marketable spectacle of architectural form either by resorting to specious naturalism or deviated engineering. Or both.