Architecture Here and There

Like using that dated and Victorian practice of washing your hands before surgery...

It's also a bit like a doctor from 1910 performing surgery on you compared to a doctor from 1920. Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye was built in 1929, and Bauhaus started in 1919, and those are the same things that are copied by modernists today. But modernists will tell you that they have "evolved" since then. And what I'd say back is that classical architecture also evolved. It started hundreds of years B.C. and was still evolving new things through the Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque and Rococo, and Neoclassical iterations. Late 1800 and early 1900 classical architecture was different from Greek architecture from 400 BC, but there were certain similarities. Did neoclassical architects of the late 1800s use the same surgical methods from 400 BC? No. Would classical architects of the present era do the same? No.

You're also right that you want something that is tried and true. What happens with computers? They change little by little and get more and more complex. A modernist, on the other hand, would say, "Hey, I have a new idea for a computer. I'll fill a box with orange juice and throw mouse feces in it. It won't look better or work better, but I'm my original expression!"

The modernists are so full of logical fallacies that it would be funny were it not so sad.

Sorry. At the end, I meant to type "It's my original expression!"

Boots - And yes, it was Victorian, because it was during Queen Victoria's reign that it was discovered that disease was often spread by germs, and that washing one's hands became standard. Soap may have evolved, but the big idea has not. Sadly, however, it is being found that doctors and nurses are not washing their hands. Modern medicine indeed!

Ricky - Very well stated! I'm sure a modernist could come back with a twist on this parallel that seems to weaken mine and yours. In the end, strict statements of fact without rhetorical ornament are the best argumentative technique. Modernists have never been comfortable with that, even in the beginning. When the modernists arose in the early part of the last century, traditionalists then in control of the architectural establishment sought mainly to compromise with them - stripped classicism, Art Deco, that sort of thing. When the modernists took control, they purged the profession, the schools and the scholarship of traditionalism. Now that classicists are trying to achieve merely an even playing field, the modernists are using every technique, from intellectual dishonesty to rigging the game against having to let traditionalists play at all (as in the World Trade Center design competition). The need for underhandedness in defense of the modernists' dominance arises from the single salient fact that the public tends to dislike modernism and like traditional work. If there were indeed an even playing field, the modernists would not last long.

You're completely right, David.