A purely scientific or sociological account, grounded on such noble concepts as truth, rationality, objectivity, or method, fails to capture the core of architecture, and, paradoxically, diminishes it.

The modernist architecture that swept the world in the first half of the 20th century was praised by its advocates and attacked by its critics for its rationalist and functionalist character, grounded on the dictates of the engineer and the technologist. Modernism and the Spirit of the City challenges this simple reading, and investigates the complex cultural, social and religious imperatives that lay below the smooth, white surfaces of new architecture. From the 1890s to the 1950s, issues of aesthetics, spirituality, poetics, national identity and commerce were interwoven in the search for the ultimate goal of modernist architecture and urban design: paradise on earth.

The aims and intentions of European architecture and urbanism in the early 20th century are reassessed. British, French and German examples demonstrate that myth, history and spirituality, on the one hand, and instrumental reason, order, and functionalism on the other, need not be understood as mutually hostile, but as essential complements to each other.

Iain Boyd Whyte