Modernism is a trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to make, improve, deconstruct a reshape their built and designed environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical experimentation, thus in it’s essence both progressive and optimistic. The term covers many political, cultural and artistic movements rooted in the changes in Western society at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Broadly, modernism describes a series of reforming cultural movements in art and architecture,music, literature and the applied arts which emerged in the decades before 1914. Modern (quantum and relativistic) physics, modern (analytical and continental) philosophy and modern number theory in mathematics are, however, also said to date from this period. Embracing change and the present, modernism encompasses the works of thinkers who rebelled against nineteenth century academic and historicist traditions, and confronted the new economic, social and political aspects of an emerging fully industrialized world. Some people divide the 20th Century into movements designated Modernism and Postmodernism, where others see them as two aspects of the same movement.
