Ease of movement
One could argue that the whole of human history is a journey toward ease of commerce and communication with hydraulics on the side. Roman roads and aqueducts remain two millennia later to underscore their importance to that empire. Endless layers of burnt and polished lime forming walkways still snake through the Guatemalan jungle as testimony to the communications link of the Classical Maya. The Tayrona of Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta built arguably too many stone walkways in an attempt to maintain commerce and communication in the obtusely moist and mountainous high jungle. The incomparable monuments of Angkor existed only because of the massive barays that held the water that made civilization possible. I suppose you could add the US interstate system to this list, which we cling to and amend daily, defying its manifest obsolescence.
In architectural history, the 20th century styles of Art Deco and Modernism celebrated the continuity of materials and lines, visually and materially embodying the ethos of commerce and communication and free-flowing hydraulics. The train and the automobile sought to symbolize sleekness and speed and the mythology of the unencumbered in their relentless windswept contours. You can still see it in the modern trains of China and Japan.
I’ve had a Mayan archaeologist comment on the hubris of their lime walkways and compare it to our own material profligacy. Each civilization burns itself out on the hulls of its kernel concepts, lost in materiality because they invested too much meaning into the thing and were afraid to let it go, confusing gross domestic product with wealth and wealth with the economic everyday. Upon its invention, the thing – the walkway, the road, the car, the chariot – meant commerce and communication and control. That meaning remained even as it drifted into obsolescence, so the civilization invested even more in it because of what it meant, not what it could do.
Civilization literally comes from the word for cities, and commerce is both the source of wealth and an end in itself, an activity that is the economic everyday. Stadtluft macht frei, nicht wahr? Six years ago I wrote about cities and the logic of concentration and how every event from the telegraph in the 1840s to the telephone in the 1870s to COVID in 2020 spurred hyperbolic predictions about the end of concentration that were wrong, as they always are. Commerce is civilization, and it means much more than money and goods, it means ideas and inventions, and new ways of smoothing surfaces, increasing speed and building up. We want to be on top of each other because that is where new and interesting things happen.
It wasn’t a wall, it was a road. And it’s name means Long City.
Photos copyright Vincent L. Michael 1996-2025
Of Boots and Buildings: Musings on Modernity
a Barry Byrne church in Pierre, SD Photo by Katherine Shaughnessy
In three weeks I will be speaking at Modernism Week in Palm Springs; my last post “What Is Modern” got a ton of hits; and I have just finished a draft of the Barry Byrne book following my JSAH article (still free during February 2011 online) “Barry Byrne: Expressing the Modern in 1920s Europe” so I have been thinking about Modernism a lot. Barry Byrne wrote a letter to Lionel Feininger at the Bauhaus in the mid-1920s disparaging the term, and he was right: What does “Modern” mean, especially now that it is overwith and reborn as a nostalgic style courtesy of Mad Men and Dwell magazine?
So I have been trying to figure our another term for it, like “20th Century” or “Late Industrial” but none are adequate and we do have to recall that Barry Byrne and all of his friends like Mies and Oud and Corbu were actively proselytizing “modern” whatever the heck it was. It was a movement. It certainly lasted two-thirds of the 20th century and it had some formal consistencies like machined finishes and ornamental abstraction or negation, but as my article noted, there were lots of different modernisms from the revolutionary asceticism of Loos to the painterly formalism of Corbu, the expressive romanticism of Mendelsohn, and the reborn classicism of Mies. Continue Reading