I'm just going to say something stupid off the top of my head. Apologies in
advance.

Modernism found God dead and chose to make logic into a god. And, like a
religion it made humans subsidiary to a diety. As geeks we understand it,
because we see beauty in the logic of a crystal, or a theorem. The arrogance of
modernism is to say: this is the logical way, and it doesn't matter whether,
say, Le Corbusier's housing feels right, it is right. It is what the machine,
the embodiment of an impersonal mechanistic logic, says is right for man.

Maybe it is just me, but I do feel that modernism has this quasi-religious and
quasi-authoritarian quality. Man felt powerless in the face of nature and
technology at the beginning of the 20th century and choose to place all his
hopes on the machine.

</hare-brained stupidity>

Michael

Keith Braithwaite wrote:

>
>Thinking of modernist German items reminds me of something my friend
>Mark said after returning from a year or so living with his then
>girlfiend in Bavaria. It's not, he said, that Germans are arrogant,
>it's just that they don't understand why anyone would do things
>differently from the the way they do them, since it is so clearly
>superior. That seems a very Modern sentiment, not surprising when you
>consider where much of Modernist design orginated. It's not
>particularly odious as utopianism goes, though. Modernism seems only
>to have become maglignant after its leading lights' escape from
>another, infinitely odious, "utopianism" in their, and its, homeland.
>
>Mark continued: and once you've been there for a while, you begin to
>see their point.
>
>Keith
>
>--- In postmodernprogramming@yahoogroups.com, Steve Freeman
><steve@...> wrote:
>
>>I was thinking more of the Apple approach to branding and
>>presentation, rather than the messy internals underneath. Their view
>>seems to be very much that there's a consistent approach to the
>>experience of using their kit (it just works), rather than, say, the
>>linux cloud of functionality.
>>
>>S.
>>
>>On 10 Apr 2006, at 10:18, Martin Fowler wrote:
>>
>>>>I'm writing this on a Mac, very much a modernist
>>>>machine (OK, maybe that's not the best example :).
>>>
>>>Interesting in a talk James Noble took a different perspective. He
>>>contrasted the Kay dream of a dynabook running everything off the
>>>Modernist Smalltalk to the reality of the PowerBook running on
>>>decidedly
>>>post-modern Unix.
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>Yahoo! Groups Links
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