The word “modern”, according to the Oxford Dictionary of English, means primarily “relating to the present or recent times as opposed to the remote past, characterized by or using the most up-to-date techniques, ideas, or equipment denoting a current or recent style or trend in art, architecture, or other cultural activity marked by a significant departure from traditional styles and values.”1 In Architecture and Modernity, Hilde Heynen pointed out that “modernity is what gives the present the specific quality that makes it different from the past and points the way towards the future. Modernity is also described as being a break with tradition, and as typifying everything that rejects the inheritance of the past (Heynen 1999, p. 9).” She further discerned modernity and modernism. “Modernity, then, constitutes the element that mediates between a process of socioeconomic development known as modernization and subjective responses to it in the form of modernist discourses and movements. In other words, modernity is a phenomenon with at least two different aspects: an objective aspect that is linked to socioeconomic processes, and a subjective one that is connected with personal experiences, artistic activities, or theoretical reflections… Architecture operates in both realms: it is unquestionably a cultural activity, but it is one that can be realized only within the world of power and money.

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