Quote:
Originally Posted by honte
Your comment interests me because, in general, the revival styles across time have been engendered by people lusting after something they don't already have.
Modern or progressive movements, on the other hand, are typified by people looking to improve upon the past for the future.
This doesn't forbid dynamic roof lines, but it does describe the difference between a sentimental gesture and an act of design.
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Your comment interests me as a good example of the kind of verbal legerdemain practiced so widely by defenders of modernism and modernity. Take the word "revival." Already a negative connotation there: reheating, repeating, redoing. Instead, we could use another word: "celebrating." Or even, "echoing," or "affirming." As in, "Affirming the best elements of Western architecture." Quite different, hm?
I just gave a lecture on British architecture last week, and I found that I couldn't get it started without the Parthenon and the Pantheon. Those two buildings come back again and again, but there is no question of "revival." Something broader and deeper is going on. Tradition.
The description of modernism as "progressive" is also a typical and questionable trope, in architecture just as in other fields. Modernism's roots come just as much from denigration and resentment as they do from any notion of "progress." The notion that "modernism" simply wants to "improve" the past overlooks its historical ambition to abolish history and tradition in the name a of radical rearrangement not only of aesthetics but society and politics as well.