Traditionalism in Contemporary World Architecture

"Since the beginning of the 20th century, Western society has been trapped in a culture of denial - rejecting institutions, traditions, and performances of the past one after another... This is most eloquently illustrated by modern architecture. For three millennia, Western builders looked back to their predecessors, respecting the temples of the ancients, perfecting their language, and adapting it to the European landscape in subtle modifications, understandable and above all humane. Then Le Corbusier burst onto the scene. He decided to demolish Paris on the north bank of the Seine and relocate all people into glass boxes. Instead of the architectural world taking this obvious charlatan and dangerous madman seriously, it welcomed him as a visionary, enthusiastically embraced his >new architecture< - although it was not architecture at all, but a prescription for hanging sheets of glass and concrete on steel structures - and set out to convince the world that it was no longer necessary to learn the things that architects once knew. Thus, the modernist movement was born."
In the second half of the 1950s, it seemed that traditional, more or less antiquizing forms in Europe and America had definitively lost support from influential architects, urban planners, designers, and theorists, as well as key institutional and private builders, and remained the domain of isolated villagers, impoverished handymen, and sentimental housewives. The graduates or supporters of Bauhaus pushed proponents of "beaux-arts" tradition out of Western universities, far from communist dictators, and even from heritage conservation (in Czechoslovakia, for example, Bohuslav Fuchs). "Humanist interest in beauty, scale, and symbolic expression was replaced by a new formula emphasizing innovation and a technical appearance." (Elizabeth Meredith Dowling) At architectural schools, the teaching of the history of architecture and classical orders was often completely abolished, and thus there was no one to train the next generation of architects and craftsmen proficient in traditional styles. Modernist architecture was presented as an expression of the revitalizing post-war society and falsely as being more economical.

Corinthian capital by Francis Terry

As early as the 1950s, the first critics emerged, highlighting the contradiction between rhetoric and practice and the devastating consequences of applying modernist principles (deurbanization, excessive appropriation of often agricultural land, excessive ecological burden, unhealthy materials, social uprooting and isolation, increased crime rates, decline in taste). American architectural historian Henry Hope Reed in his book The Golden City (New York 1959) confronted depictions of bad (modernist) and good (historical) examples (similar to earlier architect Augustus Pugin or art historian Max Dvořák) and answered the question, "why is there such devastation in our time," by saying that the reasons do not lie in economics or political associations linked to a given visual aesthetic code, but in mere fashion. In 1968, Reed founded the Classical America organization to protect and promote the classical tradition. In Europe, architectural historian Hans Sedlmayr (1896-1984) had been writing against modernist urbanism since the 1920s and pointed out in 1957: "With the emergence of a new kind of beauty of technical structures in the 19th century and also in the 20th century, a wave of ugliness passed through the world, unparalleled by anything." (translated in: Demolovaná krása, ed. and translated by Vlastimil Jiřík, Jinočany 1992, p. 46).
One of the reformist reactions to the unfortunate situation became the so-called postmodern movement. It called for the restoration of a semiotic understanding of architecture and against the exclusivity of modernity sought "inclusion" of inspirations from both historical stylistic fashions (non-classical) and contemporary, mundane to banal constructions. Postmodernists introduced irony and humor into designing, distanced themselves from the messianic elitism characteristic of the modernist program (not the practice), and openly affirmed the globalized popular mass culture. In the Czech context, postmodernism is typically interpreted as a source or first phase of a new historicism, into which its protagonists mostly gradually "fell" (Petr Kratochvíl, in: Dějiny českého výtvarného umění VI, Praha 2007). In reality, it became more of a pause and an impetus for a second breath of the modernist program, which on one side found the desired enemy against which it was possible to rhetorically define itself, but on the other side took away from it life-important lessons about the functioning of a media society and the role of commercial promotion, the cult of youth, fashion, and show, which have attracted more than relativized political-ideological slogans, even though they are still used. "Late modernism is like MTV: it gives kids what they want." (architect John MassengaleAlthough some prominent contemporary traditionalists have gone through a postmodern phase of thought and creation (e.g. Robert Arthur Morton Stern, *1939), several significant sources of contemporary traditionalism emerged in the 1950s and 1960s:

1. the work of aging pre-war classicist architects focused on private residences (in Great Britain Raymond Erith, 1904-73)
2. the amateur interest of architects dissatisfied with their own modernist training in historical styles and vernacular buildings
3. the same interest of humanistically oriented intellectuals from other professions

One of the first major public commissions given to traditionalists was thanks to Clement Conger, the administrator of rooms for diplomatic receptions in the newly established box-like building of the United States Department of State in Washington (1961). Conger, in an effort to build rooms "reflecting the continuity of American diplomacy and embodying the loftiest ideals of American life and culture" (architect Allan Greenberg) invited several American traditionalists to create a series of classical and baroque interiors (1965-1989), hosting a donated collection of authentic American furniture from the 18th and 19th centuries and suitable for receiving foreign delegations.

Allan Greenberg: Humanities Building, Rice University, Houston

These and other successes on the official stage, as well as a renewed interest from private builders, led to initiatives for reintroducing the teaching of traditional architecture at American universities. Occasional courses were organized by architects John Blatteau, Elizabeth Dowling, Allan Greenberg, Robert Stern (both Yale and Columbia), among others. It was only in 1989 (after a half-century hiatus!) that systematic teaching of classicism began at the Notre Dame School of Architecture (Indiana, USA, director Thomas Gordon Smith, also known as the editor of the new annotated and illustrated edition of Vitruvius). Here, students study historical and modern constructions, watercolor, and computer design, i.e., the construction, material, and other achievements of modernity are far from being universally rejected. In 1992, the Institute of Classical Architecture was established in New York for the education of practicing designers (column orders, working with stone and wood, drawing, evening, weekend, and summer courses, organizing excursions, publishing books and the journal The Classicist). In 2002, the Institute merged with Reed's Classical America - ICA&CA.
European traditionalists received significant support in the activities of British heir to the throne Prince Charles (*1948): in 1984, he first spoke out against post-war modernism at the Royal Institute of British Architects, prepared an extraordinarily successful BBC series A Vision of Britain (1988, book publication 1989), where he presented himself as a defender of popular taste against "the fashionable theories of the professional establishment" and set forth 10 principles that humane and beautiful architecture should respect: place, hierarchy, scale, harmony, enclosure, material, decoration, art, signs, and light, community. He founded The Prince’s Foundation, a charity supporting rural renewal, craft education, new uses for monuments, including industrial heritage, and became a patron of the civic association INTBAU (International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism), established in 2001, now containing over three thousand members worldwide.

Motivation and Practice

The numbers of professional and lay members of traditionalist associations (INTBAU, ICA&CA) are currently doubling practically every two years. Traditional motivations are developing in several fundamental dimensions, naturally complementing each other:

1) admiration for the beauty of forms of pre-modernist stylistic and vernacular architecture, reflected in efforts to preserve and develop them in new construction and heritage conservation

2) preference for traditional materials (wood, stone, brick, clay, etc.) over metals and synthetic materials, which are considered less durable (and thus more costly in the long run), difficult to maintain and recycle (ecological burden), and initially contrasting (leading to psychological discomfort) and unhealthy

3) the so-called New Urbanism (Congress for the New Urbanism, Chicago, 1993, and the document Charter of New Urbanism), aiming
(a) to improve social, psychological, educational, and ecological conditions of urban life through traditional forms, emphasizing visual diversity of forms and functions, pedestrian traffic, and creating spaces for developing community ties
(b) to protect agricultural land and nature through clear separation of urbanized and non-urbanized environments and regulating transportation and service buildings

Christopher Alexander: The Medlock House, Whidbey Island (© patternlanguage.com)

4) interdisciplinary scientific research demonstrating in mathematics, physics (fractals), chemistry, or sociobiology (evolution, adaptability) the actual existence of order, organization, and harmony in the world, from which traditional architecture (not only classical, but also Islamic, vernacular, etc.) grows in formal, material, and technological aspects, and therefore is more suitable for a sustainable way of life than modernist novelties. Pioneering comparative research in this regard has been primarily conducted by mathematician, philosopher, and architect Christopher Alexander (*1936 Vienna, later active in Great Britain and the USA, particularly in his books A Pattern Language, 1977, and The Nature of Order I-IV), today particularly continued by his former collaborator, mathematician, and architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros (*1952 Perth, books Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction, 2004, supplementary edition 2007, A Theory of Architecture, 2006).

In practice, architectural traditionalism manifests itself in various ways:

1) strongly humanistic and community-oriented projects realized through user self-help, directing intuitive human creativity through a universally applicable guide based on mental mapping (Alexander's Pattern Language)
Christopher Alexander
The Medlock House, Whidbey Island
Potash-McCabe House, San Anselmo, California
Homeless Shelter, San José, California, 1980s

(2) imitative reconstructions of monuments, new constructions of significant, socially unifying lost objects, and broad heritage conservation attentive to the protection of pre-industrial landscape character and cultural activities

(3) construction of stand-alone buildings for anti-modernist-oriented clients (villas, churches, public buildings)

(4) construction of experimental villages and towns in the spirit of New Urbanism, currently mostly financed by enlightened private individuals (USA, Great Britain, Italy, Greece)

(5) revitalization or replacement of settlements, problematic neighborhoods, and "downtowns" commissioned by municipal governments

(6) real estate development projects for recreational and residential complexes (ski resorts, seaside resorts, satellite towns), applying New Urbanism principles to enhance investment attractiveness

(7) pluralistic and humanistic history of architecture (David Watkin), criticism, aesthetics (Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Architecture, Princeton 1979, corrected edition 1980), and anthropology (Edward O. Wilson)

Basic Literature on the Topic

Elizabeth Meredith Dowling, New Classicism: The Rebirth of Traditional Architecture, New York 2004.

The English translation is powered by AI tool. Switch to Czech to view the original text source.