Finding Life in Modern Architecture

Cold, austere and unforgiving are all adjectives to describe Modern art and architecture. Through this essay this perspective will be dispelled with the close examination of three works of the Modern art movement with the intent to understand the balance of traditions function in the building of a modern world. Artists and architects of the modern period, like their predecessors, created work to speak to the world they lived in and to the future to prompt a state of soul.

​The advancements of the Industrial Revolution brought new ideas to a growing and expanding world that contributed to the conditions of modernity. Technological advances including the locomotive, the steam boat, structural steel, photography, new forms of politics (including Nazism in Germany, Communism in the Soviet Union and Capitalism in the United States), and the urbanization of modern cities helped to produce a modern mindset. Cultural changes brought on by the two world wars had compelling affects as well. Artists desired to find a new way to describe the changing world around them; their response to the conditions of modernity gave way to Modern art.