\n<\/p>\n
These things are always more interesting as a conversation than a monologue. So I asked a few people whose eyes I trust\u2014and whose answers I knew would be more interesting than my own\u2014to weigh in on this month\u2019s theme. Bettina Korek<\/strong> has run the Serpentine Galleries<\/a> in London since 2020 with a kind of rigorous openness that I find genuinely rare; she thinks about culture the way the best designers think about space, which is to say that what you leave out matters as much as what you put in. Lily Atherton Hanbury<\/strong>, co-founder of Le Monde B\u00e9ryl<\/a> (and an architecture graduate of the University of Pennsylvania), I\u2019ve known for years, and her instincts for beauty are the kind you can\u2019t really teach. And Sophia Roe<\/strong>, stylist and founder of The Garment<\/a>, brings something I find quietly compelling: A sensibility that is both instinctive and completely considered. I learn something every time I talk to any of them.<\/p>\n \u2060Is there one object, space, or piece of work\u2014old or new\u2014that you think perfectly captures the modernist spirit?<\/p>\n Lily Atherton Hanbury:<\/strong> Le Corbusier is the first to come to mind because he turned modernism into a belief system. His practice broke completely from the traditions and rules of the past, formed between a rapidly changing world and the constant, ritualistic experience of daily life. Reduced, sleek forms inspired by movement and the machine age were transmuted through a reconnection to nature and the human body. He believed design could elevate the experience of living. And if I had to choose one example that reflects this, it would be Chandigarh<\/a> because it was so comprehensive, created a new vernacular, and still feels incredibly current today.<\/p>\n Sophia Roe:<\/strong> Donald Judd. [His work] matters because it\u2019s considered. I think that\u2019s what makes it enduring\u2026 it doesn\u2019t impose itself! And the reduction isn\u2019t really about aesthetics, as we understand aesthetics today: It exists purposefully without any need to be further explained, and that\u2019s quite a standard.<\/p>\n Bettina Korek:<\/strong> For me, it\u2019s the Serpentine Pavilion. Not just one of them, but the whole program. Baudelaire said modernity was the transient, the fleeting, and the contingent; I think that\u2019s exactly what the Pavilion is. Each one is a complete work and a series that never ends, so every year, an architect who\u2019s never built in the U.K. constructs something different on the lawn of Serpentine South. That openness and infinite continuation is the modernist spirit for me. It\u2019s not a style, it\u2019s this ongoing experiment.<\/p>\n