Professor Rebecca Cavanaugh’s Redefining Modernity
Professor Rebecca Cavanaugh teaches our HDCS Redefining Modernity class, which epresses modernity as a prime importance to architects, designers and decorative artists in the early decades of the 20th century, spurring the development of a number of new styles and designmovements in France and beyond. Cavanaugh focuses on lecturing on L’Art Nouveau, the “New Art” of the Belle Époque, and the launching of a quest to develop a design program that would give rise to Art Déco and French expressions of Modernism as it sought to define the new era – an era marked by changing social mores and political ideals, mass industry and technology, an increasingly high-speed global world, and the horrors of modern warfare. Cavanaugh traces the origin and development of these self-consciously modern movements in France from the turn of the 20th century to the advent of World War II, examining their expression through architecture, furniture, product design, fashion and interiors. The courses exploration brings the class face to face with the works themselves through visits to Parisian museum collections, temporary exhibitions and historic buildings and interiors.
One of these trips includes a visit in April to Roubaix, near Lille, to visit the recently restored Villa Cavrois, designed by Robert Mallet-Stevens between 1929 and 1932. Mallet-Stevens, a contemporary of Le Corbusier (who designed the famous Villa Savoye around the same time), conceived of this building as a “modern chateau” that would combine the luxurious air of a 17th-century aristocratic residence with the values of modern architecture, such as absence of ornament, new technologies and amenities, industrial materials, and a focus on light, air and hygiene. The dramatic proportions, spacial organization and lighting effects recall Mallet-Stevens’ involvement with the cinema, inviting comparison with his sets for Marcel L’Herbier’s film, L’Inhumaine. For more information, check out the villa’s website. In the future weeks, a blog post will be dedicated to this field trip specificially, highlighting what the students gained from the experience.