Juhani Pallasmaa's Essay On Tradition And Modernity In India

Hrushita Davey

PA101614

Prof. Pratyush Shankar

History and Theory of Urban Design

10 April 2015

The Project of Modernity in India

Background

“I wanted to point out the significance of tradition in architecture and in fact for all creative works. During the 1980’s modernity was frequently accused of abandoning history and tradition. This argument was central to the post modernist ideology…….. History and tradition are complex phenomena and they are strongly present in the dialectical process of questioning the characteristics of the modern attitude” Juhani Pallasmaa, Essay on Tradition and Modernity

The Modern Movement as we have come to understand and experience over time,

It draws strength from innocent faith in a future brought about by new architecture and art. This modernism was largely immaterial and weightless; it consciously avoided symbolism and tried to achieve a sense of timelessness in its spatial experience. The second kind of modernism was rooted in the idea of a realistic view of culture sans illusions. It boldly expresses gravity and stability acknowledging materiality and the earth. This New Modernism seeks time through material and memory. This transformation of modernity did not happen all at once. The momentum of the First Modernism began losing ground in the ‘50’s. Louis I Kahn and Aldo van Eyck appeared as the front runners of this change. Kahn was responsible for bringing back the archaic and supernatural dimensions while Aldo introduced a structuralist

This because at any given point in time one has concluded an era or an age as history, be it Nehruvian or Colonial Imperialism, if only for the moment. Relationship between architecture and modernity has been noted by historians such as Lewis Mumford and Walter Benjamin with their main concern being the City. Thus one can confidently conclude that it is in the urban life that we speak of this relationship between Modernity and Architecture. Some of the key elements that establish this link maybe identified as follows: 1) Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (written between 1927 and 1940) speaks of the Fig 1.2The Arcades Project materialism in Paris during the 19th century as a result of industrialization. He stresses on the vitality of technology to the aesthetics and economies of Modern Paris. The Hausmannian Paris was based on the deployment of materials in a manner that provided for creation of typical bourgeois life, such as the train station, the department store and the arcade, alongside visual symmetry of boulevards and grand scale public spaces. 2) The second link is the growing dominance of visuals in modern life. Architecture relies heavily on vision. Fig 1.3 Monte Carlo Project, Archigram