Quote:
Originally Posted by Veritas
A better way to form the question would be "has minimalism/futurism failed?" to which the answer would, of course, be yes.
It used to be that buildings were based on 5000 years of tradition, of trial and error, finding out what best pleased the eye. Did you know that more years separate the Pyramids from the Colosseum than the Colosseum from us?
Architecture used to be about this trial and error, of combining the tried shapes with new ones and different ones and finding out what worked and what did not. Now it is about pleasuring the critics with outlandish and alien shapes that do not care for the landscape around them or the people that work inside them, all out of this bizarre desire to fulfill what they perceive as originality.
I am a writer, and this philosophy reminds of one commonly applied to media--namely, to be original, all of your ideas cannot come from anywhere--they must be conjured up from blackness and bear no similarity to anything else that existed before, and anything else is plagiarism. This is called "stupidity".
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Architecture reflects the cost of materials, culture, wealth, and, technology.
I think technology is most important, today, and that technology is affecting architecture in unforeseen ways.
A) The masses have a far larger visual language than ever before. This started with still photography in the 19th Century and has rapidly evolved to where now we have YouTube, selfies, etc.
This visual language increasingly is shared across cultures. Person X in Iran and person Y in Brazil often have similar definitions of what "good" and "bad" buildings and infrastructure is "supposed" to look like.
B) However, despite so many across different cultures having similar visual educations, each culture when viewed at the same time, has differing feelings about what buildings should show about the culture into which buildings are placed.
A classic example, IMO, is often visible in former Soviet block countries where citizens react very favorably to constructing buildings that DO NOT look like "commieblocks." In such cases, new buildings are meant to reflect a "new chapter" in history.
This extends to most countries (and cultures) that both have experienced huge increases in standards of living and have becoming increasingly independent of the Western hegemony. Many, worldwide, want their modern architecture to be separate from the classic European tradition, and, to a lesser extent, the US rectilinear glass box.
Rebelling against classical Western architecture, however, is becoming very difficult because so much has already been "invented" by that tradition.
Current excesses will temper off as more cultures incorporate steel beam construction into their native architectural styles.