Alternative abstractions of modernist architecture

Le Corbusier and Ozenfant in Purism (1921) state the goal of Purist art as placing —the spectator in a state of a mathematical quality, that is, a state of an elevated order—. This paper will take the poetic possibility of abstraction in the work of —modernist— architects as a guiding thread for an investigation of an alternative modernism in the twentieth century. If there is a modernism defined by the —universalising abstraction of technology— and the —unsituated tabula rasa— as pre-requisite for the creativity of the aesthetic genius, the argument will be made for an alternative modernism concerned and working with abstraction not instrumentally, but in a manner which, in making its own representation a subject for itself, gives space for a resonant creativity. The contrast will be drawn between a —figurative— and aesthetic understanding of art and architecture on the one hand; and —abstraction— as a practice/theory where - mimesis folds back on that which is mimed, and effects it (destroying its —originality—) - the act of mimesis speaks of that act itself, saying something of itself - and (thus) affects the work and affects the mimesis of the work in a movement of staging The aim will be at once to rescue abstraction from technological reduction, and to show abstraction as an ongoing theme for architecture.