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Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts '

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Reflection on All That is Solid Melts, by Marshall Berman (pg. 286-310)

How does this piece fit within or relate to other pieces we have read this term?
Marshall Berman writes of many modernist visionaries that helped develop the modern world and each visionary had a significant influence on some major cities in the world. In this writing Berman describes the impact of Robert Moses’s work/life in New York. Robert Moses was a significant urban designer of the landscape and lifestyle of New York City and his ideas is a cornerstone of what modernism in urban design is today. Evidence of this is seen in his methodologies he employed in the design and framework of the cityscape that New York is known for. Moses did not trouble himself with the …show more content…

Modernism as an allure that keeps society always looking forward to what’s next, but what if modernism isn’t the only pathway? Yes, Technology is great and modernizing the world has done great things for quality of life, but what about areas where modernism fails? Modern urban design is far from any utopian ideal, so it obviously has its shortcomings. I wonder where these shortcomings are an why it seems so hard to quantify them into a legitimate argument against modern design.
This writing by Berman was particularly interesting in all the quotes from opposing viewpoints of writers who weren 't necessarily designers, but of observers of urban development captured in a time that’s hard to relate to if not for these other pieces of work. The quote in the beginning by Rem Koolhaas described a city of wonder and technology advancing so fast it seemed magical. That last quote from the Great Gatsby I had not realized had so much context to what we’re studying. A city described in ashes, where ashes begets more ashes through undying advancement and rebirth. New York described as a city never really having an identity that’s solid, instead melts into ashes swept into the air and made again and

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