I recently came across two interviews on YouTube on “Theory of Architecture,” one by Mark Wigley, the other by Patrik Schumacher. Wigley sounded like a middle-aged architecture student. Schumacher was rather pedantic in his Germanic way, and he made some outrageous claims: Romanesque and Gothic buildings were not really architecture because they didn’t have architects, drawings, or texts. The last seemed important to him: you needed the “discourse” to make real architecture.
Schumacher did say one interesting thing. That the architect needed to understand his time in order to function properly. He did not elaborate, but the point is well taken—Mies said much the same thing: “Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.” It’s not what the architect wants, it’s what the times demand.
But I wonder if Wigley, Schumacher and their ilk do really understand their time. Or is it Bob Stern, with his eclecticism and post-modern approach?
What a sorry state our field has descended to when that is the choice!