I have just returned from a journey around the world in pursuit of a vision that, when new and fresh, was breathtaking in its passion and ambition. It was a vision of a better, more egalitarian world, of liberated minds, of cities that were healthier and more technically ambitious than ever before.

This movement went by many names and flourished in different countries in the years just before and after the First World War, but the name that stuck is both simple and complex: Modernism.

The spirit of Modernism was to produce art, architecture and artefacts that had never been seen before: ornament was dismissed as unnecessary, abstract rather then figurative forms were seen as the embodiment of universal values, and history was the enemy: the Modern Movement wanted to free mankind from the shackles of the past. The machine and pioneering technology were the keys to the future.

The high ideals of Modernism, however, were betrayed. Since the Second World War Modernism has been best known for its failure to create architecture or art that has public appeal. But it is clear that Modernism — in its aspirations, at least — was one of history’s great artistic movements, a marvellous marriage of art and science, of Utopian ideals and commerce. It was, as the V&A exhibition argues, “the most influential design movement of all time”.

In pursuit of the Modernist dream — and to make a series for BBC Two — I set out on a pilgrimage to see some of the high points of the Modernist world. I went to Italy, Moscow, Chicago and New York. But for me the city that says most about Modernism — about its history, its aspirations, its early achievements and influence and its downfall — is Berlin. It is the city that saw the rise of Modernism, then saw it repudiated and outlawed in the early 1930s — accused by the Nazis of being culturally alien, Bolshevik and Jewish. It finally died at the hands of the very thing beloved by Modernists — the machine — as the city was pounded to rubble by the aerial fleets of the Royal Air Force and the US Eighth Air Force.

For me, any visit to Berlin is a haunting experience: it is a place of dark memories that cast shadows over its bright and bustling contemporary life, a domain of spectres, of cruelly shattered dreams. And this is never truer than when you contemplate Berlin’s Modernist history. You can see the heroic and the tragic.

For the heroic, go to the AEG Turbine Factory that was built near the city centre — on Huttenstrasse in Moabit — for Germany’s General Electric Company. It was completed in 1908 and, with its bold utilitarian form, its use of steel frame and huge areas of glass to let light flood in, is the epitome of the modern, functional spirit. The factory produced turbines, and is nothing less than a splendid machine for the production of machines.

Despite being almost 100 years old, the building still looks stunningly modern. Unlike traditional history- inspired architecture, it is timeless rather than time-bound. The functional basis of its design makes the building strong and its well-lit, open interior adaptable.

For these reasons this powerful structure still fulfils its purpose — only now the machines being manufactured are precision-made rather than turbines for steam-powered and coal-fuelled warships.

To see the Turbine Hall from the exterior is thrilling; to see it from the inside is sublime. It evokes the poetry of power, the purr of machines, the smell of the oil; the light cascading down through soaring walls of glass makes walking inside intoxicating.

The architect for the hall was Peter Behrens, in many ways one of the fathers of Modernism, not least because three young men worked for him who were to have a profound influence on the architecture of the 20th century: Charles Édouard Jeanneret, later to call himself Le Corbusier; Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. Mies was to visualise glass and steel prismatic towers for Berlin in the early 1920s but did not build them until he arrived in the US after the Second World War; Gropius went on to found, in 1919, the most influential design and architecture school in the world.

The Bauhaus, at Dessau, an hour’s drive east of Berlin, became the inspirational heart of progressive Modernism. Avant-garde artists and architects taught there until it was closed by the Nazis.

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