es failed to create innovations in architecture, although in reaching into history for inspiration urban architects chose neo-Renaissance (humanist) rather than medieval (religious) styling for their monumental works. Even so, the growing urban population lived in faux Baroque-style housing, a kind of throwback to aristocratic grandeur on the part of the upwardly mobile urban bourgeoisie, or alternatively, for the masses, in housing of utilitarian uniformity. That was consistent with the urban planner Sitte's view that modern existence was distinguished by "the lack of a coherent set of values by which to live" (Schorske 69). Similarly, the architect Otto Wagner cited the "painful uncertainty" of modern experience (Schorske 85).
That the experience of contingency should mark modernity can be seen in the fusion of values and physical environment that inhered in two parallel and not unrelated dynamics operating in nineteenth-century Europe: (1) the reification of science (however misunderstood it might have been) by way of Darwin and Spencer, and (2) the Industrial Revolution, which over the course of the nineteenth century spawned industrial capitalism as both label and fact of life. Together, these phenomena, which pushed traditional values aside (Schorske 69), brought into the discourse of the intelligentsia and public policy multiple issue fronts and much new vocabulary: working class, bourgeoisie, capitalism, evolution, anomie, alienation, survival of the fittest, the masses, revolution, etc. Schwartz notes in that regard that "scholars equate modernity with modernization as a set of social historical relations" (3). Further to that point, Harvey explains that revolutionary discourse in response to the social-class inequities of industrial capitalism fostered deliberate attempts to adjust them--attempts that could be called well-intentioned but that inevitably entailed unforeseen consequences.
Consider the ultrarational Haussma...