Dan Solomon’s “Whatever Happened to Modernity?” plenary (we don’t have keynotes at CNU) is still the most-requested item from CNU XIV. We have a transcript, a PDF slide show, and even a video “available for download”:http://cnunext.org/icharrette/info/sessions.html#926.

bq. Daniel Solomon, co-founder of CNU, will build on the special address by discussing contentious design issues. In the United Kingdom, as in the United States, New Urbanism is pinned in the crossfire of style wars. On one side are jihadists who regard the entire modern world as cultural nihilism; on the other are critics and powerful institutions relentlessly embracing novelty in the name of an historically ordained modernity. Between these extremes, New Urbanism steers an unsteady course, snipped at from all directions.

bq. The situation is made more intractable by the Germanic strain of modernism that infected the teaching of architecture and town planning. However, other, more useful modernist traditions infuse cultural phenomena such as fashion, dance and music with different historiography and different conceptions of the relationship of the tenses: past, present, future, and future perfect.