Ironically, they replaced the rigid rules of the Academy of Arts with their own. It used to be "you can't be anything but traditional", now it's "you can't be anything but contemporary".
"modern" architects are also stuck in the past, copying Wright, Van De Rohe and Corbusier as if we were still in the 50s. We're trained to make the difference between old and new but do regular people care ? There's virtually no difference between the UN headquarters and a modern tower built in the 2020s, even if the UN headquarters were designed in the 50s. 70 years later and we're still stuck with the same designs.
There's also the whole "of our time" arugument which has to be the dumbest mental gymnastics to oppose traditional archtiecture I've ever heard of because everything built today is "of our time." All new buildings, restoration, and even demolitions represent the political, economic, and social aspects that demanded their construction, renovation, or destruction. Be it reconstructions of buildings destroyed in WW2 around Europe, the demolition of aging office blocks from the 60s and 70s, or the glass clad pencil towers of New York which are demanded by the elite, all buildings can only be built due to their times.
Additionally, we've already had neo-classical, neo-gothic, neo-byzantine, neo-egyptian, neo-mayan, neo-aztec, neo-literally everything along with Chinoiserie and Orientalism. Why do many architects act like all of a sudden it's a crime to harken back to the past in contemporary design, despite the fact that it's been a constant in all architectural languages since time and memorium.
I don't think everything should be greek columns forever but it doesn't hurt to look into the past and adapt it for the present. Doing that has created some beautiful buildings that respect the local traditions while still pushing the pendulum forward. RAMSA buildings in New York or Spanish Social Housing ,2, 3 are some great examples of buildings that are unabashedly contemporary work while continuing the local traditions of their area.
The whole chasing "progress" and always trying to be new and unique seems like a losing game.
I actually like some modern/postmodern/contemporary architecture but a lot of it still feels unrefined and half baked compared to old styles that evolved over centuries
Every contemporary architect wants to be unique for the sake of it but because of inherent human limitations they have to take some shortcuts to get things done. Traditional architecture has a repository of millions of "shortcuts" to make buildings beautiful but of course you don't use that if you want to be maximaly unique. So the architects have to omit details and neglect some things.
To truly create something absolutely unique and beautiful would probably take the sort of dedication that Gaudi had for the Sagrada familia, which essentially killed him in the end.
Ironically in their pursuit of being unique modern architects start to look similar to each other. But unlike traditional architects they are in denial about it
Yes and in the story I heard he was so disheveled looking he was mistaken for a homeless man, which aparently also delayed the medical attention he got.
That's one of the things that annoy me the most: those buildings are a view of how the future would be... from the 60s. We're so far beyond the conceptual horizons of thosse peoples that we're starting to pass the dates of their science fiction in reality. The future architecture doesn't exist because it was never created since everything devolved in just a repetition of the same architecture tropes for three quarters of a century now.
Yeah, and they still have this victim mentality of not neing accepted in art and architecture academies, even though it was almost 100 years ago.
Nowadays anything that does not fit theire style is mercilessly berated by them, but paradoxically they still view theire architecture style as some sort of "underdog" movement.
I was in architecture school in 2019 and anything remotely traditional was seen as "historiciste" and "passéiste". "go to historic preservation if you want to restore stuff, we build the future here"
Well that's your school, not universal. Dunno why they'd be stupid enough to say that when the employers their graduates hope to get jobs from work on historic projects. Plenty of the projects done by my cohort included traditional elements, and of course many of us now work in practices specialising in historic buildings. I don't know how people can pretend there's a modernist orthodoxy when practices like Purcell exist. Does this look like modernist orthodoxy to you?
In Ireland the word they use to dismiss these designs is 'Pastiche'. No building is worth saving, no matter how popular, unless the design is from the original era.
Currently there are efforts to demolish the St. Stephen's Green Shopping Centre on these grounds.
Maybe so, but it's one of the most loved modern buildings by the public. My point is that why is it not worth protecting just because it's not an example of typical 1986 architecture?
What’s strange to me, is that doing anything traditional is simply copying other architecture. However, doing the same thing for nearly a hundred years (at least for residence housing), is not. Why are the building industry so chained to the idea that «contemporary» architecture is the only viable option, while it at the same time is copying whatever was done from the past 20 years? Why isn’t that considered copying and creative stagnation?
Italian fascism loved modernism.
Le Corbusier was a fascist.
Germans loved classical.
Communism loved classical in the beginning then switched to modernism.
Yeah, I’m glad that we’ve used ‘historical value’ as a way of saving attractive old buildings but I like to point out that the only reason people like those attractive old buildings is not because they’re old but because they’re attractive.
We wouldn’t really need to spend as much effort saving old attractive buildings if we still made as many new attractive buildings.
Because making contemporary is way cheaper and we live in a financial depression, it all bases itself on Corbusiers "function over all" approach that has exploded after ww2 (also financially tough times). Contemporary building is what you get when the people in charge are cheap, just like AI ads
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u/Hiro_Trevelyan Favourite style: Neoclassical 3d ago
Ironically, they replaced the rigid rules of the Academy of Arts with their own. It used to be "you can't be anything but traditional", now it's "you can't be anything but contemporary".
"modern" architects are also stuck in the past, copying Wright, Van De Rohe and Corbusier as if we were still in the 50s. We're trained to make the difference between old and new but do regular people care ? There's virtually no difference between the UN headquarters and a modern tower built in the 2020s, even if the UN headquarters were designed in the 50s. 70 years later and we're still stuck with the same designs.