I like the modern building in Paris very much, but it works because it is narrow and different. The whole point is that it's something the rest of the block is not. It's a parody. If there weren't anything for it to be different from, it wouldn't be a very interesting building. Can you imagine a city full of them? How banal it would be. Glass is just not that interesting when you have to walk by hundreds of feet of it.
And THAT, in my opinion, is why the majority of people these days don't much care for modernism. 50 years ago when modern buildings were rare it was very interesting, but now that American cities are full of concrete and glass and have very little ornament, there just isn't enough to look at. Yet another glassy geometric building makes the city less interesting rather than more so, so most people don't like it. That's also why Europeans are more tolerant of modernism than Americans, IMO - Euro cities are packed much more full of historic ornamented buildings, so there is more for modernism to be different from. In the US, most cities don't have enough detailed buildings to support a large number of non-detailed ones. European cities do.
Modernism is great art, and makes for great landmarks and monuments. It's not good for the sort of buildings that are repeated 10,000 times over in every city in the world. Those more common but less grand buildings need something modernism can't provide by its very definition - human-scaled, non-repetitive details. Walking along the sidewalk we need something to look at, plain and simple.
I'd like to see architects devote less time to sculpting monumental shapes, and more time to finding interesting new ways of producing ornament. For example,
this building is unmistakably contemporary, but "traditional" in the sense that they have tried to make it interesting at the human scale using ornament. In my opinion it is at best a middling building, not by any means a great one. The architect tried, and failed as much as he or she succeeded. It's just something to illustrate the point. Imagine how much better we could produce if architecture schools were even a little bit interested in the subject, or if world-class architects put their brain power in to it.
Alas, architects these days are only allowed to produce a narrowly-defined type of building if they want to be taken seriously. It's our way or the highway. Our art is the only good art. Howard Roark is a hero because he bucked the establishment, but nobody had better buck our establishment now that we're in charge. Saying we must always produce buildings "of our time" has over the decades become code for "we can't allow any other type of art", which is counter productive to the very concepts that modernism purports to be about... and
that's why asking where one can find a school that teaches a different curriculum is a valid question. If we're ever to produce buildings better than that example I cited earlier (and I hope we can), our schools are going to have to stop treating ornament like a taboo to be ignored and start teaching students how it works.
The more we dogmatically ignore anything that isn't "of our time", the more we doom ourselves to never moving beyond our current time.
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