Toward Another Kind of Architecture: A Short History

In an age dominated by the climate crisis, the role that Architecture plays in securing the future of human life on our planet looms larger than ever. Most people are deeply concerned about global warming, yet at the same time are under the false impression that this crisis has somehow suddenly descended upon us and taken us by surprise. The fact is that for a hundred or so years we have been steadily building in the wrong places, in flawed form, by questionable means, and absent transcendent intentions. We have embraced the car as the dominant mode of transportation and, in accommodating it, have consumed prodigious amounts of land, energy, and resources without being much concerned about the massive damage this has caused our cities and nature. Finding ourselves in the midst of an environmental crisis, which is in fact an urban crisis, we are in dire need of rethinking the way Architecture is taught and practiced today. Not only for what it is, but also for what it means and for how our design thoughts and actions may be affecting the integrity of our habitat now and going forward. Human beings have been asking two interconnected questions since the dawn of urban civilization three or so millennia ago: Where am I? and Who am I? The first question addresses issues of sustenance, health, and shelter; does harnessing nature while establishing and managing the places where we all live generate a stable and productive habitat? The second question probes the meaning willed into our projects, whether buildings, settlements, or landscapes. Are they realized as a platform for belonging, one that addresses spiritual needs and provides for a discrete individual and community identity? Answering these two questions has always been a profound responsibility for architects and builders. The invention and refinement of credible design ideas and construction skills and their constant transference from generation to generation is what we have come to call Traditional Architecture.

Up until the middle of the twentieth century, every village, town, city, and metropolitan center in the world had an established, unique form that was shaped to best support their economic, social, and spiritual life. The public and private architecture and urbanism of all these places gently morphed over time, powered by changing living needs, clear symbolic programs, received models of design, and best tectonic practices. Change was managed by building slowly, deliberately, organically, and operating with an understanding and appreciation of received knowledge. In the process, urban and rural places were cast in a clear balance with nature and reflected the cultural predilections of their inhabitants. This classical and vernacular order of building going back millennia was weakened after the Industrial Revolution and ruptured after the end of World War I in 1918.

Encouraged by the collapse of many European empires, appalled by the inequity of the social and economic systems then in place, and horrified by the brutality of trench warfare, many young architects turned away from the authority and guidance of tradition. They imagined themselves being aligned with the organizational and aesthetic prowess of the rising high industrial economy that had just won the war, rejected all precedent, and aimed for an ex novo, more enabling and more politically egalitarian society to be delivered through a brave new architectural and urban culture. Their ultimate vision was not realized until after the Second World War, when the cores of many of the world’s greatest cities were destroyed by aerial bombardment and their reconstruction became an urgent task. The architects that had previously only imagined the birth of a new society were finally given the grand opportunity to deliver it by having their theories adopted as the form and process of choice for post-World War II reconstruction. They accomplished this extraordinary transition by hitching their cause to the idea of the inevitability of perpetual progress: harnessing the industrial economy and financial might of their countries, serving the political ends advocated by governments across the political spectrum, adopting new technologies as a fashion platform, dominating the professional press, and taking over architectural education worldwide.

From the 1950s to the 1980s this radical modern political, economic, and architectural elite was entrusted with the rebuilding and extending of European cities and the restructuring of US ones through urban infill and suburban expansion. In the next decades, and through an insidious process of economic neocolonialism, they also became the de facto leaders of the radical transformation of cities throughout the rest of the world. As we now well know, the results of this grand experiment in tradition-canceling design turned out to be catastrophic: every world culture has lost most if not all of its built heritage and huge swaths of its natural endowment. Their habitat burdened by the ugliness, uniformity, impermanence, declining economic values, deficit of meaning, and social injustice caused by just a few decades of sloppy suburban sprawl and irreversible damage to historic urban cores.

In less than half a century, the previously unique character of every world settlement has been reduced to a state of wanton placelessness. Social culture, political regime, economic conditions, local natural resources, geographic location, and climatic inputs no longer seem to have an effect on the definition of an architecture and urbanism that promotes attachment to place and local belonging. The modern project has delivered dire consequences: cultural disruption, memory loss, and alienation across the board, everywhere and for everyone. It continues to do so at present, its promises dominating most individual practices and architecture schools alike. Despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the perpetual invention of obscure innovative form and achieving starchitect status are still considered as the most prized goals of our discipline and profession. Yet the tragic gap between architects’ claimed intentions and the actual results of their labor continues to widen from year to year.

Not surprisingly, the reaction to this kind of relativist and ultimately corrosive approach to architecture has been swift. Beginning forty years ago, a few lone voices began to argue for a return to an architectural culture of continuity, first by the postmodernist attempt to introduce classical and vernacular architectural fragments into new projects, and then by launching a full-throttled movement to seek a reconnection with the traditional cultures of place-making that were severed two generation earlier. Urbanism was slowly rediscovered as a discrete discipline. Walkability, mixed-use development, typological variety, neighborhood, district and public realm design, transitoriented development, multimodality in transportation and light site imprint have all together become a potent platform for imagining urbanity anew. At the same time architecture has also been recast in its full complexity. Accessing the diverse classical and vernacular traditions of the world has allowed for framing the future under the best possible ideas that humans have ever entertained or realized into form. Typological design, diverse programming, project character based on local culture and climate, contextual design in the city and nature, a focus on the human scale, and the aesthetic, social, and psychological effects of buildings have all together become the ingredients of a new traditional architecture. Its ultimate purpose is the incremental healing of our physical world and the reintroduction of beauty as the measure of contemplating our broader place in the world. We find ourselves in the midst of this long journey to revise our understanding of architecture from an autonomous fine art practiced for the benefit of a few to a unified discipline and practice of building, urban and environmental design reaching out to benefit all people of the world. We will all be engaged in this search for place and meaning for decades to come. And we will not stop practicing, teaching, writing, advocating, or serving the cause of this other kind of Architecture until the physical and spiritual integrity of the human habitat, it cities and nature, has been fully restored.

STEFANOS POLYZOIDES Professor and Dean The University of Notre Dame School of Architecture