The International Style of architecture was born from the same industrial conditions that led to modernity. It spoke a cold architectural language, one that rejected ornamentation and subjugated artisanal values to function. It is seen today as a failed child, both from a postmodern perspective, and from the criteria of modernism’s own utopian ideal. It is an architecture which never delivered the better life it promised the masses; instead introducing standardised, dehumanised forms of architecture “which suffocated dissenting voices in an attempt to impose general principles of minimalist taste.” (Postmodernism and Architecture, Diane Morgan 1998)
As the inheritors of the modernist architectural legacy we are surrounded by buildings, bridges and highways where aesthetics have seemingly been subordinated to functionality. However, Kate Nesbitt, in her paper The Sublime and Modern Architecture disagrees, saying that “the sublime can be seen as an unarticulated aspect of continuity from the stylistically disparate nineteenth-century through twentieth-century abstraction.”
The sublime aesthetic inherent in the International Style was ignored by the artists and theorists of the period, who were instead anxious to emphasize the supreme importance of rationality and function over considerations of form. Later, the postmodern evaluation of the style focuses on, and reacts against, the dislocation and disembodiment it attempted to enforce upon people and the resulting alienation people felt from their environments. For nearly a century, consideration of the sublime has been sidelined in any debate regarding the aesthetics of the International Style.
My work contributes to the discourse surrounding the modernist aesthetic. I aim to exploit the sublime qualities inherent in this style of architecture, creating a new, subjective, architectural landscape. I degrade photographic images with the tools of mechanical reproduction; by repeated copying and resizing. I then re-compose the image through collage, fabricating false reflections, fracturing planes and surfaces, resulting in an intensification of the sublime and a tension between what is expected and what is seen.