Short lessons for understanding some of the origins of modern architecture

Bajo Martínez de Murguía, Fernando

It is obvious we can trace back any stylistic trend from its official inauguration. The primordial soup, from where whatever modus operandi takes place always boils previously, melting among different ingredients. These “short lessons” try to make us understand a little bit more accurately some of the origins that give place to what is commonly described as Modern Architecture. Far from any kind of dogma, or formal approaches, they let us dive into part of its essence through some of the ideas still stirring today’s panorama of the discipline. Ideas that are not at all new, despite their contemporary features, but come up from a long line of events we can already track and identify in the past centuries.
Based on four main bodies of general knowledge (approaches, emotions, ideas, and marketing), this text spans from the Enlightenment revolution times to the dusk of the influence of the Modern Movement, focusing on concepts and authors who represent this evolution through their proposals... Always dealing with the keystone in Architecture, the difficult balance between emotion and reason, two human attributes in fact complementary but most of the times understood as opposites.