Neomodernism: Tradition within Revolution

In the 21st century most buildings that are created within the traditions of the rational approach to design on the one hand and the laconic geometric pattern on the other hand are usually referred to as the new wave of Modernism, or Neomodernism. This inevitably causes some confusion over the terms since Neomodernism can have various meanings. First of all, it is an architectural trend of the 80s of the twentieth century that once again made the general provisions and principles of the traditional Modernism and Functionalism of the first half of the 20th century. In the 1970s they were moved to the background of the world architecture by Postmodernism and High-Tech.

Modernist projects surely kept on emerging but for some time they were not the leading architectural trend. It is significant that in the 1980s and even in the 1990s such large international companies as KPF or SOM continued to build a great number of high-risers within the various Postmodernist stylistic versions; and the skyscrapers that were designed in a more restrained manner were considered something exclusive and authentically new. In order to add more progressiveness and to partially win back Modernist former positions in high-rise construction, they started to use the prefix “neo” in terms of such newly built objects. It was meant to mark off the old Modernism that had compromised itself and was nearly rejected by subsequent architectural trends and its new redefined versions rather than to describe a completely different turn of the development of the artistic language of modern architecture.

Secondly, the local professional terminology creates an additional complication that is associated with the use of the term “modern” that does not follow the conventional western practice. We consider Modernism as a solely artistic movement of the early 20th century that is equal to the French “art nouveau” or the German “Jugendstil” and the “modern movement” that has absolutely nothing to do with Modernism. As a result Neomodern and Neomodernism that define absolutely different artistic phenomena of the second half of the twentieth century sound almost identical and, for instance, when translated from English, they can seem the same. In this overview we are going to dwell on the new perception of the traditions of solely Modernist architecture.

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Text by MARIANNA MAYEVSKAYA