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LEDENTModelversusTypetheShiftofModernism.pdf
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Even though modernist ideology is no longer operative in current architectural theory, it has produced a substantial share of today’s collective housing. It is imperative to comprehend the theoretical basis on which those dwellings were conceived when it comes to understanding how they can be inhabited today and what lessons we can learn from this pioneering experience. Driven by an unprecedented fascination for hygiene, machines and science, the rhetoric of modernism left little room for differentiation, variety and irrationality. This caused a major rift in architectural theory. Much more than the obvious formal revolution, building design shifted from implicit types, based upon a long sedimentation of uses and techniques, to reproducible building models. This rupture is probably one of the most significant features of modernist architecture. While the associated methodology has generated great achievements in institutional buildings, it seems to have reached its limits when applied to the production of modernist collective housing. The genesis caesura in modernist architecture theory, from type to model, can be traced back through a sociological analysis of modernity and its shortcomings (J. Habermas). As A. Touraine points out, modernity ought to balance rationalization and subjectivation (or individuation). Yet, modernist architecture theory, with its fear of emptiness and its promethean desire for control, has set aside subjectivation. By discarding the basic virtues of mankind such as uses, culture and social life, architects turned their backs on type as means to design buildings. Type is indeed, in essence, able to alter itself according to natural, cultural or human needs, whereas model is repeated at will regardless of its position and its cultural conditions. This criticism of modernism can be corroborated in various examples of modernist housing (Le Corbusier, E. May) but also in architectural statements (9th CIAM by Groupe Alger). In the field of collective housing, the shift in thinking between type and model is particularly acute since it failed to adapt to social transformation, ignoring the rise of individuation. Modernist housing is therefore an unfinished project since it has not been thought nor built for the sake of dwelling. Through this specific historical revolution, the paper intends to show how the opposition between type and model can be theorized to serve architectural criticism.
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Ledent, G., & Masson, O. (2011). Model versus Type, the Shift of Modernism. In Efe Duyan (ed.), Theory for the sake of the theory (pp. 10-22). Dakam publishing. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/230912