Twentieth Century Oceans

In the aftermath of the second world war, modern architecture reached a decisive moment. The diverse threads of functionalism, rationalism and minimalism – now largely cleansed of the mysticism that had afflicted some of the earliest interwar modernists – had wound themselves into something resembling a new architectural mainstream, and it was, to a large extent, the principles of modernism that would serve as a guide in the reconstruction of post-war European cities. While some towns attempted to build exact copies of the pre-war urban spaces that had been lost, many of the larger cities – at least initially – sought to make a break from the established forms of the past.

In the western world, music was experiencing a similar upheaval, with a new generation of composers attempting to free their works from the structures and harmonic…