Quote:
Originally Posted by malec
I don't agree with this. Buildings should be expressions of whatever the hell the architect wants rather than conform to certain ideas. The general public often complains when a more daring project gets proposed in a historical area especially, how is that any more or less wrong than proposing a revivalist building in a district with only modern buildings?
What about all the romanesque churches or neo-classical buildings, aren't they revivalist buildings, yet I never hear anyone complaining about those 
Sure a major problem with such buildings nowadays is the possibility of using cheap materials. There's nothing worse than seeing a cheap building trying to mimmick historic buildings but that doesn't mean the whole concept has to be ditched just because of that, even though some of the best loved buildings in the world are revivalist. It all boils down to good design vs bad design, as with any modern building.
Anyway I say fuck the trends, architecture should have no bounds |
Well I guess we agree to disagree. My perspective comes as a historian who grew up in a Chicago built under the principles of some of the finist buildings and modern architectual traditions in the world. The 1893 Columbian Exposition was heavilly criticized as a set back to the modern movement because it was revivalist. Architects of Gothic cathedrals didn't built Roman temples, and neither should we build either today. Past traditions had their moment in culture and time. When modern architects present a design that is a throw back to some past style it says to me that they are incapable of originallity. Architecture says who we are as a people and is the greatest expression of our place in history.
My adopted home town has a National Historic (Architectual) District consisting mostly of 19th century Italianate, Victorian and other period architecture. This thread posed a question: Within this district could a modern design fit? I think the answer is yes, and without producing a 21st century copy of a Queen Anne. Historicism should not betry the present.