These things are always more interesting as a conversation than a monologue. So I asked a few people whose eyes I trust—and whose answers I knew would be more interesting than my own—to weigh in on this month’s theme. Bettina Korek has run the Serpentine Galleries in London since 2020 with a kind of rigorous openness that I find genuinely rare; she thinks about culture the way the best designers think about space, which is to say that what you leave out matters as much as what you put in. Lily Atherton Hanbury, co-founder of Le Monde Béryl (and an architecture graduate of the University of Pennsylvania), I’ve known for years, and her instincts for beauty are the kind you can’t really teach. And Sophia Roe, stylist and founder of The Garment, brings something I find quietly compelling: A sensibility that is both instinctive and completely considered. I learn something every time I talk to any of them.
Is there one object, space, or piece of work—old or new—that you think perfectly captures the modernist spirit?
Lily Atherton Hanbury: Le Corbusier is the first to come to mind because he turned modernism into a belief system. His practice broke completely from the traditions and rules of the past, formed between a rapidly changing world and the constant, ritualistic experience of daily life. Reduced, sleek forms inspired by movement and the machine age were transmuted through a reconnection to nature and the human body. He believed design could elevate the experience of living. And if I had to choose one example that reflects this, it would be Chandigarh because it was so comprehensive, created a new vernacular, and still feels incredibly current today.
Sophia Roe: Donald Judd. [His work] matters because it’s considered. I think that’s what makes it enduring… it doesn’t impose itself! And the reduction isn’t really about aesthetics, as we understand aesthetics today: It exists purposefully without any need to be further explained, and that’s quite a standard.
Bettina Korek: For me, it’s the Serpentine Pavilion. Not just one of them, but the whole program. Baudelaire said modernity was the transient, the fleeting, and the contingent; I think that’s exactly what the Pavilion is. Each one is a complete work and a series that never ends, so every year, an architect who’s never built in the U.K. constructs something different on the lawn of Serpentine South. That openness and infinite continuation is the modernist spirit for me. It’s not a style, it’s this ongoing experiment.
