Viewpoint: A Culture of Despair: Reflections on ‘Post-Modern’ Architecture
- 1 November 1986
- journal article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Sociological Review
- Vol. 34 (4) , 837-854
- https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954x.1986.tb00700.x
Abstract
The Modern Movement in architecture is dead: on this there is consensus from Right to Left. Anti-modernism, a cultural offshoot of anti-socialism, has become decidedly modish. There are, for us, two main strands to this ‘Post-Modern’ thinking – the populist and the patrician. Each, we argue, is a formalism, an elitist practice; above all, each is an avowed refusal of the emancipatory potential of modernism. Our critique of this resignation, this cultural despair, turns on an affirmation of early modernist practice; it turns on the proposition that the social content of design practice is the issue underpinning matters of aesthetic form.Keywords
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