Sorry to give offence here - only one man's opinion of course - but I can't help feeling Tom Wolfe got it just about right in 'From Our House to Bauhaus'.  At least the architecture of previous centuries meant something, whether it was reverence for the classical tradition or just High Victorian exuberance.  Le Corbusier and all the other sods simply carried through that crisis in confidence which appeared in the arts well before 1914:  Picasso, Duchamps, Dali, James Joyce - you name it, brother!  We've never recovered from the virus, and all it's led to is moral relativism and the wholesale destruction of city centres, plus monstrous additions like the Gherkin and the kind of rubbish littering up the area around the Louvre.  Sorry, chaps, but it's the Albert Memorial for me every time.  Gaudi sucks, too.

i respect Prince Charles a bit on architecture - Poundbury, whilst ugly, is possibly a step in the right direction (i.e. trying to build an actual *TOWN* instead of endless car-dependant Barratt Homes style housing estates with no facilities). Britain suffers from celebrity architect idiots (Foster, Rogers, Alsop, Hadid etc) just designing 'landmark' buildings (or whatever the term is) in town centres, that don't fit in and just exist in isolation to their surroundings, whilst the rest of the country is ruined by awful housing estates and endless boring office blocks (always glass-faced, to reflect those beautiful clear blue English skies!).

two obvious, well-known London buildings i've always loved are the Barbican Centre and Centrepoint. neither perfect of course, but i think show that style can be achieved with big blocks of concrete.

town-planners did manage to mess up most British town centres, but that doesn't mean there are some great 50s/60s/70s buildings around throughout Britain

Okay informed parties. Would anyone care to throw out some book recommendations? My knowledge of Modernist architecture is a bit haphazard and too web-based.

Just taking stock.  Something deep inside me finds immense interest - even fascination - in this aspect of modernism; yet the reality of it still strikes me as chilly as a deadstock rayon shirt.  It seems inorganic somehow.  Liking the look of, say, an ivy-clad (if you'll forgive the expression) Georgian rectory has nothing to do with aspiring to live in one in some Sloane-y sense - I was brought up in what's commonly known as a brick terrace, amongst railway workers - but simply acknowledging tradition. 
Now - here comes the heresy - my Dad doesn't like Parker, Art Pepper, the later Coltrane.  He likes Louis, Roy Eldridge, Woody Herman, Clifford Brown, Lester Young - mostly what came before be-bop.  John Simons I happen to know likes Stan Kenton; how deeply he goes into, say, hard bop I have no idea.  Now, I love Graham Marsh's introduction to the Blue Note book - beautiful - linking the clothes with the music; but when it comes to linking the art, design and architecture with the clothes and music I have to take a step sideways - not backwards, sideways.  As it happens, a guy I've known since my teenage years, who lectures on design around the world was critical of Frank Lloyd Wright (to my face) and advised me to have another look at the Natural History Museum.

Only an unintelligent man is incapable of changing his mind; he learns from experience; but modernist architecture just has too much of the totalitarian about it for my liking.  I'm all for democratization - the ideals behind the Eiffel Tower were sound - but too much of what was pure and noble in theory has turned out to be the visual equivalent of Roland Kirk at his most unrestrained  IMO.

Last edited by Decline & Fall (2009-05-20 12:11:24)

What fantastic 'Star Trek' type architecture and design, very evocative of a period when the future was everything and anything seemed possible. Those pictures illustrate what a great leap forward was taken by Saarinen and his like, probably too far forward for their time in some ways. Some of today's buildings such as the 'Gherkin' and London City Hall are very innovative in their way but the preponderance of metal and glass makes them seem bland and uniform by comparison.

I should probably have mentioned that most of those iconic pictures above are by Balthazar Korab, the documentor of Saarinen's work, and a great artist in his own right.

Re: Gehry et al. Although I too prefer clean line modernism, I do think there's a place for WOW architecture too. By nature, it's ok if an opera house or an art museum or the Ishtar Gate stands out a bit, is more flamboyant than the rest..

It's around that time that the self-referential, ironic, nothing-can-be-judged-better-than-anything-else-past-present-future induction loop, called post -modernism started to get rolling, but I wouldn't say that's a hard and fast date!