N Y C   A R C H I T E C T U R E   O F F I C E

Modernism is the result of the French Revolution of 1789. The aesthetic of the Third Estate.  Part of a larger project to make what was before, the Ancien Régime, disappear. The Ancien Régime consisted of the First Estate, the clergy, the Second Estate, the nobles, and the Third Estate, the peasants and bourgeoisie.  After the Reign of Terror,  after the Estates of the Realm, the three estates, or the order of the Estates General of 1789, was abolished by the Third Estate, composed of commoners forming the National Assembly, inviting the other two estates to join them. This event marked the outbreak of the French Revolution. Modernity, buoyed by ideas of efficiency, reason, and the industrial revolution, had made it possible around 1850 that artists no longer respected centuries of an established classical order, culture, aesthetics, and political structures. In modernism perspective, deep space is abolished, as is all narrative and most decoration.  It has been mentioned elsewhere that architecture was traditionally made of space rather than just being in space. The walls in the new architecture forever float, are conceptually transparent, translucent, and weightless, multi-colored planes. The modern artist invented abstraction. The certainties of the then-established order were jettisoned. History was erased. The program to expunge and annihilate the past made it impossible for a new system to rise. It embraced abstraction, stream of consciousness, and, in music, the 12-tone scale. It embraced the opaque picture plane, imagism and free verse, the anti-novel, primary colors, and anything new—artists united by an avant-garde that challenged conventions. Representation was forbidden.  Modernism is a socialist aesthetic. The economic and social order of the three estates before this time had been a long-standing order of social and economic hierarchy in Europe from the Middle Ages until the 1800s. I will argue that the arrival of modernism in the late 19th Century is a philosophical, economic, and political project rather than a materialist or artistic one.  Fundamentally, the genesis of modernism is the reaction to the Third Estate's prohibition from attending the "États Généraux de 1789" [the Estates General of 1789] by locking the assembly doors. The commoners' Third Estate was urban and rural and composed 98% of France's population. It would become the Estates General immediately, and later in the 20th century, the modern movement. 

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