Question 1 - Modern Art
Suppose some of your friends say that they hate modern art, architecture, literature, music, thought, and politics. They resent the use of tax money to support the production or display of foolish attacks on traditional forms of expression. What, they ask you, is the point of modernism, and why should we tolerate it as part of our society? How would you answer?
You may agree or disagree with your friends' distaste for all things modern and revolutionary, but your answer should be based on evidence you have discovered during our study of the humanities, including the reading for this unit. Is there a respectable way to make sense of modernist movements, or are they simply rebellion for its own sake?
Question 2 - Modern Architecture
Let us begin to wrap up our discourse with each other where it began, with a look at architecture. Consider the modern style expressed by Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier, along with the postmodernism of Sir Norman Foster, Phillip Johnson, and Frank Gehry.
How have their designs contributed to our sense of the spaces we inhabit?