Modernism and the Archaic City: The Pre-Industrial Past in the Imagination of 20th Century Urban Design Criticizing the apparent chaos of the present, many architects and planners of the twentieth century imagined a coherent order in the archaic cities of the preindustrial past. Moreover, they employed detailed examples of preindustrial urban forms in order to address what they saw as the most urgent problems of contemporary cities. Surprisingly however, few historians have commented on this phenomenon. Revising standard accounts of modernism’s break with history, Professor Raynsford maps out previously submerged connections among the images and discourses of urban design. He argues that the modernist idealization of archaic form was central to the genesis and definition of the modernist city.