Includes bibliographical references (pages 335-344) and index.

What modern is: introduction -- Space opens up -- Staging modernity: the aesthetics of the future -- A new style of life: artifacts of modernity -- At home in the brave new world -- Buildings like crystals, forms as cold ice: the styling of modernity -- Toward totality: planning for perfection -- The human form endures: contingent modernism -- Wooden ships: the modernism of complexity and contradiction -- After modernism: experimental design -- Re-modernism: design for sprawl.

At its root, modernism is that fundamental. It is a question of having something to represent that is of the moment. In the most radical interpretation, modernism always comes too late. The modern is that which is always new, which is to say, always changing and already old by the time it has appeared. Modernism is always a retrospective act, one of documenting or trying to catch what has already appeared - an attempt to fix life as it is being lived. Modernity is just the very fact that we as human beings are continually remaking the world around us through our actions, and are doing so consciously. Modernism is a monument to or memory of that act, which in its own making tries to remake the world it is pretending to represent.