The New Traditionalists

By the mid-1970s a wide dissatisfaction had grown up with Modern Architecture, which began to be viewed as an arrogant imposition of inadequate environmental ideas upon society. Its basic ideals were seriously questioned and eventually its “death” was recorded. It was soon followed by the growth of a fashionable “Post-Modernism” invented by a number of critics and historians as a substitute style. Although it proved insubstantial it did, however, lead to a revival of interest in historicism as an architectural language and a return to Neo-Classicism.

Post-Modern Classicism can be seen in the guise of much overscaled and bulky concrete (often prefabricated) architecture for housing schemes as well as public buildings, in Europe and the USA. The monumental work of the Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill and the American Michael GRAVES is perhaps most closely associated with this form of Post-Modernism. In contrast to this trend there was also a growing fascination with vernacular and regional modern architecture and with what Bernard Rudofsky had described as “Architecture without Architects”, the title of his celebrated 1965 MOMA exhibition.

“Free-form” Modern Architecture, too, expressed a growing awareness of new values of vernacular and indigenous building materials and traditions, ranging from Japan to Hungary where the Pecs Group and Imre Makovecz exerted considerable influence. Thus, “community architecture” and a closer public identification and participation in design and planning processes proved significant. Many schemes were produced indicating varying approaches to the housing problem, from the early prototypical prefabricated Habitat project by Safdie for the Montreal Expo in 1967, to the work carried out by the Belgian architect Lucien Kroll with his student “clients” at Louvain University, as well as the Byker Community project by Erskine at Newcastle and Rod Hackney’s more conventional people’s housing at Macclesfield. The community architecture development led, particularly in England, to a much greater awareness of conservation issues, culminating in the Prince of Wales’s general popularity as the movement’s “guru” and the bearer of a new vision of architecture.

Thus, as we approach the end of the millennium a curious situation has emerged in architecture: pluralities have been recognised, there is a much wider acceptance of historical precedent (as in the work of the American architects Charles Moore and Michael Graves), and a sensitivity has been displayed in relation to ecology, nature and the organic approach to design. There is also a genuine excitement — particularly among the younger generation — over architecture’s new freedoms and opportunities.

Internationally, a great interest has been shown in the independent identity of regions and national cultures and this has been reflected in History of architecture, whilst in the former Communist countries the heavy concrete work of the post-war years is gradually giving way too to a lighter and a much more adventurous aesthetic.