The End of an Era

 
The world had had it with Classicism. This was around the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The world had tried for a few centuries to carry on the tradition of refinement from the heights of the Renaissance world of Michelangelo, Raffaello and Leonardo da Vinci. The brilliance could not be sustained. It became a fatigue. The world rebelled, to be free, of the yoke of a weighty heritage and the regimen of rules that evolved in the attempt to come to terms with the mysteries of art. But as with all revolutions, the fervour became just another habit and eventually lost all its meaning and there ensued a general sense of chaos, which in the minds of some persuasive thinkers, was in itself something to celebrate. The true intent of modernism thus has become apparent but perhaps that is as far as it can go. The world has now also had it with Modernism. Where do we go from here?

There has arisen a sector in the architectural profession, that is rebelling against the pre-eminence of modernist architecture in urbanism. There is a recognition that the modernist aesthetic somehow fails to create coherent cityscapes. This is because each individual project is seen as an end in itself. The modern city is made up of groups of buildings designed by the celebrated architects of today but unfortunately it is akin to an orchestra made up of virtuosos all playing their own music in different keys. Brilliant as though the individual player might be, cacophony is the result. Harmony can only result from a co-operative operation that uses a common language, hopefully with the help of a qualified conductor.

In their approach the so called traditional architects or sometimes called 'New Urbanists' make one singular error. They remain members of the same professional institutes as the practitioners whose views they oppose. So while making declarations about the need to change fundamentally the way in which buildings are placed in society, they cannot seem see the need to create a breakaway group that offers an alternative professional charter. If it is, as some seem to see it, a matter of choice, then we are reducing the representation of architecture down to mere 'style'. Good architecture has nothing to do with style. It is about beauty - formal beauty and functional beauty - at best a fusion of spatial and structural expressions that are comprehensible, sensible, stable, comfortable and durable. Architecture per se is made for everyday use rather more than to just impress ourselves with our own cleverness. Energy bills should be low!

It's not important to be concerned that Michelangelo, Raffaello and Da Vinci set a benchmark of greatness. What's the use of comparisons? We must evolve classical forms in our own ways even if they are not as brilliant as those of the past. We must stop believing that progress has an arrow that always points onwards toward novelty and then conveniently assume whatever is new must be better than what has been. The point is not that we must honour past achievements by creating standards or rules. The point is that beauty is timeless and that creativity is not about competing with others but rather to create things lovingly, and in so doing, to hope that the creation is entertaining to those for whom a work of art is made. In order to proceed serenely with my own work, may I assume that we are at the end of an era, the era of dogma, academic restrictions and egotism.