Great architects have moved on from Modernism, and their work is warmer and more poetic for it.
Philip Johnson, the American architect of skyscrapers and former assistant to Mies van der Rohe, once said, ‘All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.’ Given his penchant for designing terrifying blocks of glass and granite, you have to assume he said this on one of his days off, when he had the grandchildren round to play or when he was in bed with man-flu (himself in need of a cuddle or some exaltation).
Architects like Johnson, Mies and Le Corbusier dominated the story of twentieth-century architecture through the evolution of a rational modernism that succeeded thanks mainly to its power of universality. It was a one-style fits all school of design that neatly absorbed the principles of the Arts and Crafts movement, the new construction methods of concrete and steel, the philosophy of the machine age and the international optimism of capitalism. And through those included disciplines it spread like wildfire, establishing itself by the Fifties as the appropriate style in which to build offices, factories and high-rise housing estates alike. Modernism has shaped our modern environment more than any other single cultural idea. And frankly, it's always been rather short on cuddles.
It's been argued that Norman Foster is the heir to this tradition of rational reductionism, and certainly there's a whole strand of his practice's work that seems to be based on the principle of the super-refined glass box in which human beings are factored in as components of the structure, like a grey cubist ants' nest. But then Lord F also does sexy curves and cuddly shapes too, like the Gherkin or the Sage Centre in Gateshead (a sort of melted gherkin).
Populist critics like to blame modernist architecture and town planning for every social ill of the last fifty years, from the growth in urban teenage violence to the decline in sales of trilbies and the disappearance of pigeon fancying. In particular, populist critics love to slam Modernism as an entirely inappropriate architectural style in which to build houses. As though we were still trying to construct Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse in Milton Keynes.
Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, it's hard to pinpoint the die-hard architectural practices that are still working in a purist modernist idiom. Apart from the odd (very odd, and disturbingly unoriginal) slavish copy of a Twenties or Thirties white box that a small British practice might occasionally throw up for a private client in Surrey, there's almost no proper Modernism left. Wheedle out the rash of grey steel sheds with glass porticos shoved on the front that pass for office blocks, and what are you left with? What are the defining qualities of proper architecture right now?
Well, I'll tell you one thing, we're not clinging to the rust belt of the machine age. Just as our capitalism and industry likes to present a clean, people-focused image, so Modernism seems to have softened into familiar anthropomorphic shapes. Look at the work of fascinating international practices like Herzog & de Meuron, David Chipperfield and Sauerbruch Hutton to name just a few, and what do you see? A new language is emerging which owes much to Modernism, but which is far less rigid, much more contextual and poetic, and responsive to human desires as well as needs.
This new, cuddly, exalting, stimulating, friendly style in fact represents the quiet triumphing of another, softer twentieth-century story over that of Modernist monotheism, the story of beautifully shaped buildings by Scharoun, Aalto and Saarinen. Today that story continues to evolve in its trademark tentative, exposed, self-conscious way (think of Miralles' Scottish Parliament or Rem Koolhaas's Casa de Musica on 2007's Stirling Prize shortlist). And it puts people and their delight, not processes and their efficiency, at its heart. If you think of it as Johnson's Modernist dream coming of age, with some rounded corners on it, you’d be wrong. It is more beautiful than that. It is Lyricism.
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