This follows the publication we produced last year, We care therefore we are – an adaptation of Descartes’ dictum, ‘I think therefore I am’. This discussed the obligations of a learned profession to hone its skills to improve the lives of others.

We will produce another publication and host a main-stage panel discussion at the Festival, focusing on JJM’s concept of ‘second century modernism’. He contends that in its first century, dating mainly from the end of World War I, modernist architecture depended on technological rationality to achieve its goals. The results were striking, but all too often crowded out any sense of humanity, subordinating feeling to reason. Consequently, modernist architecture alienated many people, thus compromising its intention of appealing to a wide public by improving their lives.

JJM is launching a book, Second Century Modernism, on this subject at the Venice Biennale next month. Through the work of Form4 Architecture (he is co-founded and chief artistic officer), he explores how a sense of humanity can be brought back into design, tapping into what he sees as an era of emotional abundance and demonstrating his liking for absurdity, paradox and kindness.

As co-author of last year’s publication, I explore here the deep roots of the dichotomy between feeling and reason, especially as it entered architectural thinking through the legacy of the scientific revolution of the 17th century and the Enlightenment of the following epoch. The combination of reason and feeling is an inherent characteristic of architecture. Most buildings have an explicit purpose; the architect/master-builder/ mason in charge of turning intention into reality has to contend with physical conditions, such as gravity and the physics of building materials. So all architecture has a rational base.

This person then has to organise construction of the building, implying, from a very early date, a sophisticated division of labour. That too needs a rational response to marshalling labour, materials and finance to a directed end. As buildings became larger and more complex, it is easy to see how this dynamic became dominant in building design and construction. This was especially so as the rise of ‘technical rationalism’, as one of the most acute commentators in the professions, Donald Schon, puts it, more or less coincided with the formalisation of the profession and associated systems of architectural education. Reinforcing JJM’s view, this slightly preceded but nearly coincided with the emergence of ‘first century modernism’.

That does not tell the full story. Much earlier, people had already realised that buildings could induce a series of emotions in them, but did not neatly fall into rational categories. Nor did it take their instigators long to realise that such feelings could be manipulated for their ends. Sensations like awe, wonder and intrigue, could all be corralled towards certain outcomes. Almost every civilisation, from Ancient Mesopotamia to the early modern West, exploited this condition.

From the early modern period, a new twist emerged. Essentially people began to reflect on the reasons why they had strong reactions to certain types of experience, rather than just accepting them as part of the natural order of life. Starting with the Renaissance, interest arose in the world around us, how and why it was ordered, how it might be represented and how it might be manipulated. This was as true in art – the discovery and development of perspective – as in politics, where the struggles of the mediaeval period to establish just government reach the ruthless pragmatism expressed by Machiavelli. And in architecture, theory became almost as important as practice through the work of Alberti and his followers.

Meanwhile, scientific knowledge of how the universe and the human body work grew, through the efforts of Kepler, Galileo, Descartes and Francis Bacon among others, and the mediaeval monarchies of Europe evolved into absolute states. Consequently, intellectual activity took on a new dimension. In Baroque Rome and the France of Louis XIV, architecture and other art forms became almost co-terminous with the state, representing the aims and beliefs of government to the mass of the population.

Even the sophisticated patronage of Louis XIV and his ministers like Colbert, could not completely confine the skills of artists like Velazquez, Poussin and Bernini. Their works may have strongly reinforced the political programmes of their masters but they also convey something outside approved beliefs. Perhaps the best illustration of this is Velazquez’s great portrait of Pope Innocent X, which the 20th century painter (and acute observer of old masters), Francis Bacon, intuited as depiction of repressed fear, which he explored in his ‘Screaming Pope’ series.

Innocent’s ‘fear’ may have been existential, or a reflection on the impossibility of his position (as a pope struggling with the loss of papal authority and the fragmentation of the Roman Catholic order). But it shows how art could introduce emotions capable of disturbing the serene surface of the Counter Reformation or an absolute state. One of the first commentators to recognise this was Edmund Burke, who published A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful in 1757. For Burke, the beautiful was regular, ordered and unthreatening, while the sublime was challenging, awe-inspiring and capable of inducing a frisson of terror.

The full title is important as it pinpoints the intellectual dilemma that the failure of Cartesian and Leibnitzian rationality to explain emotions induced. The English Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton (in The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 1990) proposes that aesthetics grew as a category of philosophy precisely to fill this gap, both explaining how emotion could legitimately be stimulated by sensory experience, while also framing it within the scope of philosophy and so subjugated them to rationality. (This was a century before Nietzsche blew everything apart). Thus the primrose path through Kant, the Schlegels, Hegel and Schopenhauer to the aforementioned author of Also Sprach Zarathustra and ultimately Kunstwissenschaft unfolded.

Not surprisingly, this complex intellectual condition is embedded in modernism, certainly in its first century variety and arguably into its second 100 years. This can be seen in two foundational texts of modern architecture, M-A Laugier’s Essai sur l’Architecture (1753) and J W Goethe’s Von Deutsche Baukunst (1773).

Laugier, a Jesuit and occasional preacher to Louis XIV’s grandson Louis XV, came from the heart of the Franch Enlightenment, inspired by the belief that reason could surmount all challenges, from understanding architecture to curing politics. His Essai chimed with John Soane, who drew on it for his lectures at the Royal Academy and owned multiple copies. It fuelled the development of a rational approach to modern architecture, especially the distinctly French version of structural rationalism.

But even Laugier could not ignore the power of emotion: 'I enter Notre Dame, the most eminent of our Gothic buildings in Paris, though not by far as beautiful as certain others in the provinces which everybody admires. Nevertheless, at first glance my attention is captured, my imagination is struck by the size, the height and unobstructed view of the vast nave, for some moments I am lost in the amazement that the grand effect of the whole stirs in me. Recovering from the first astonishment and taking note now of the details, I find innumerable absurdities, but I lay the blame for them on the misfortunes of the time. For all that I am still full of admiration when after my thorough and critical examination I return to the middle of the nave and the impression which remains with me makes me say, "How many faults, but how grand!" From there I go to St Sulpice, the most eminent of all churches we have built in the antique style. It neither strikes me nor impresses me, I find the building to be far below its reputation.'

Notre Dame Cathedral

This neatly encapsulates Eagleton’s argument, as Laugier is initially overcome by the experience of a great Gothic cathedral but knows he has to recover his composure through the application of reason.

Goethe puts forward a very different view. In praising the chief mason of Strasbourg Cathedral, Meister Erwin, and having a none-too-subtle dig at Laugier on the way, he wrote: '"It is in a niggling taste", says the Italian, and passes on. "Puerilities", babbles the Frenchman childishly after him and triumphantly snaps open his snuff box, a la greque. What have you done that you should dare to look down your noses? Has not the genius of the Ancients risen from its grave to enslave yours, you dagoes? You scramble over the ruins to cadge a system of proportions, you cobble together your summer-houses out of the blessed rubble, and you think yourselves the true guardians of the secrets of art if you can reckon the inches and minutest lines of past buildings. If you had rather felt than measured, if the spirit of the pile you so admire had come upon you, you would not simply have imitated it because they did it and it is beautiful; you would have made your plans because of truth and necessity; and a living, creative beauty would have flowed from them'.

Strasbourg Cathedral

Goethe allowed himself to submit to his emotional response, though it was nothing like as extreme as certain German architects and theorists expressed a century and a half later. But much of the foundation of modernism in Germany can be traced to this these feelings, for instance the Expressionism of Bruno Taut or early work by Hans Scharoun.

As Germany became the engine for modernism after World War I, through the efforts of Ernst May in Frankfurt, Taut and Martin Wagner in Berlin and especially Gropius and his team at the Bauhaus (Weimar and then Dessau), this dynamic informed its development. In our publication for WAF we will explore how even the most apparently objective of the Neuesachlichkeit (new objectivity) buildings positively pullulate with emotion. Meanwhile to the north, Aalto and Lewerentz were quite literally shaking the elegance and proportions of ‘Swedish Grace’ neo-classicism, while slightly later the complacent corporate culture of the USA could not contain the experience of studying architecture in sight of the skyline of Chicago or the excitement of mass air travel.

The White Party, Bauhaus Dessau, 1926. Photo: Rudolph Binnemann

Our publication and the associated panel discussion will demonstrate that, however emotion and ‘loveability’ may have been sidelined in architecture for too long, there is plenty of evidence that modernism can and does rise above these limitations and is set to thrive in its second century.