ART 76030 Horacio Ramos 000139984

A contest of futures
What can be gained by attempting a single definition of modernity in art history, and
in particular, in architecture history? The term has been used in so many different ways,
both by architects and historians, that defying it seems not only difficult but also less
productive than, for instance, analyzing the intentions behind its specific uses.
In A contest of futures (2016), Eley, Jenkins and Matysik suggest that it is still
relevant for historians and social researchers to reflect on modernity as a global
category. The authors understand it not as a pre-established condition, but as a staged
representation (Mitchell) imagined in diverse contexts. They draw on post-colonial
studies to argue that modernity is a construct never fully achievednot even in
colonizing nations. The historiography of modern Germany had established the locus of
a missed path, according to which the Nazi dictatorship was the result of the countrys
failure for developing a normal modernity. The authors argue, in contrast, that
different agents imagined different modernities in contradictory and acentric ways, as
exemplified by the books essays. For instance, in the context of the Deutscher
Werkbund, local reforms in the applied arts were associated with Germanys larger
imperial project (Maciuka); and modernist design were emptied of a progressive social
vision (Jenkins).
Emptied of its normative character, modernity broadly indicates a volatile and
complex pattern to content. However, one might wonder if that was an exclusive
feature of modernist events. In The altdeutsche Zimmer (2003), Stefan Muthesius had
argued that around 1876, before modernism, a Munich-based movement of domestic
interior designers invented their field by defining themselves as artists. They used
Bavarian-Alpine motifs to imagine and ideal of vernacular design, satisfying their
consumers need for a sense of tradition and continuity (Lowenthal). This specific
moment in the history of architecture was certainly a contest of futures. During the
1870s, these group of designers had to constantly struggle against the traders usually in
charge of interior decoration and, only a few years later, in the 1890s, their movement
already felt superficial in opposition to a new sense of Volk and race in Germany.
In an indirect manner, Muthesius essay complicates the broad definition of
modernity by showing that contested futures are also present in architecture and
design not exclusively defined as modernist. For architecture historians, the
necessarily global category modern seems pertinent when studied in relation with the
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ART 76030 Horacio Ramos 000139984

local stylistic debates and categories (such as the vernacular) used to imagine or
contest it.

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