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decline along with the Modernist architecture he championed and the utopian hopes

of which he was the Messiah. Platonic geometrical forms were all very well, but to
critics the reality was cities full of boxes. In Britain and America, these boxes, poorly
constructed by hard-pressed city authorities, betrayed all the original utopian hopes.
Critics like Jane Jacob (The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961) accused
rational planners like Le Corbusier of blighting working-class lives and
neighbourhoods, while urban planning expert Lewis Mumford said he had "warped
the work of a whole generation, giving it arbitrary directives, superficial slogans

and sterile goals."

Le Corbusier bore the criticism with austere Stoicism: “A hundred times have I
thought New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: it is a beautiful catastrophe.” The
same could be said of Brasilia, commissioned in 1960 as a new Modernist capital and
symbol of Brazil’s future. But its designers had no sense of how cities grow
organically; none of its utopian aims were achieved and planners still struggle to

resolve its problems.

Architecture by its very nature is seldom a one-man band. Yet Le Corbusier probably
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influenced what the 20 century looked like more than any other single person. Now
that we’re Post-modern, How do we feel about this?

7. Sergei Eisenstein
Eisenstein was a part of the Modernist renaissance that blossomed in the early years

of the Soviet state. Although Lenin’s new Bolshevik regime suppressed opposition
political parties, avant-garde artists, which meant Modernist artists, were at this time
allowed to innovate. Eisenstein created masterpieces of early silent film history
which were also celebrations of the Bolshevik Revolution. Battleship Potemkin was
about the 1905 “dress-rehearsal” for this Revolution when sailors in the Tsar’s navy
mutinied. Its most famous scene is when soldiers fire on the demonstrators and a

pram topples down the Odessa Steps.

Eisenstein perfected the use of film montage, where two or more different images
are projected onto the split-screen to make a visual point, or to provoke an
emotional response by the simultaneous use of dissonant, jarring images. Eisenstein
perfected montage and made it the staple of avant-garde cinema. It reflected the
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fragmentation of 20 century life and its headlong rush of simultaneous images. All
this was before Stalin’s regime suppressed artistic freedom and imposed “socialist

realism” (lots of cheery, burly peasants and muscley, determined workers). For the
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remainder of the 20 century, avant-garde film was suppressed politically by Stalin,