The original modernists in architecture - and in all arts, for that matter - were rebels. They despised the overadorned, fussy, and overstuffed Victorian age designs and interiors and were trying to bring architecture into the 20th century by making it more efficient, cheaper, standardized, and functional. These were admirable goals.
They did not achieve their goals very well, although some critics still think highly of individual houses designed and occasionally built by the modernists. Their followers tried to bring these to the masses. The “House of Tomorrow” was a common theme at World’s Fairs and other exhibitions throughout the 1930s and it was our bad luck that the Depression meant that the innovations these presented were not adopted until decades later.
Admittedly, form does not need to follow function as a general rule. Function can certainly do quite well with extraneous design elements. But the streamlining movement of the 1930s certainly made huge strides in both beauty and effectiveness for a vast variety of household products and industrial equipment, and it has to be considered an outgrowth of modernism. Art Deco and Art Nouveau also grew out of the same discontents as modernism and both were successful design strategies. They found some use in architecture as well.
Brutalism is a mystery to everyone excepts its practitioners, but the glass box style of architecture still has not been superseded because nobody can figure out a more efficient alternative. And glittering skylines do have a beauty that are hard to match by older buildings, which tend to work far better with fewer stories.
Even so, modernism is dead, and has been for decades. There’s no real point railing against it today. Post-modernism is another matter, although the only thing that holds post-modernism together is that it is not modernism. No coherent style has replaced modernism. This is truly odd, but I think it is mostly a matter of economics. You can do only so much with a skyscraper and not have it be prohibitively expensive to build.
The individual post-modernist buildings are harder to judge. According to everything I’ve read, they need to be seen in person and experienced in situ. Pictures don’t capture them. Since I’ve never seen a Gehry or his peers’ structures and gone in and explored them I feel I can’t say much about them. Some certainly seem to be embraced by the public. Some do not.
This raises the question of what you want the alternative to be. We can’t go back. Anything built up until, say, the Depression was designed and executed based on the availability of vast numbers of cheap laborers, even for the most specialized arts. The detailing of these buildings may be beautiful, but no one can afford them today. Any architect has to keep this in mind. No doubt that’s why many went in for extensive use of concrete. It’s cheap and it’s strong. Ugly beyond belief, to be sure, but saving money is also beautiful to a lot of people.
To have a new style of architecture appear means using materials that are cheap and strong and beautiful. This may be happening with new composite fibers and other innovations. But architecture is a weird art, dependent on the whims of owners and the realities of physics and economics. I don’t find any appreciation for this in the OP. Some areas of cities were beautiful in the 1920s, yes, but they were totally different from the cities we live in today. And the ugliness of much of the rest of those cities is not commented upon. Tenements were not beautiful. Ordinary worker housing was not beautiful. Factories were not beautiful. Being selective with memories allows you to prove just about anything, but your arguments will fall apart as soon as they are pushed.
I like both old and new structures. I admit that we have lost a sense of monumentalism that gave us lasting city halls, banks, universities, and public buildings that have not properly been replicated. But the insides of many of those grand outsides are almost unusable by modern standards, narrow, constricted, dark, cut-up (or wastefully lofty and vast), and impossible to climate control.
It’s no good saying you want a new architecture. Buildings have to be as good to live in as to look at. What do you want a building to achieve? What do you want a city block to do for you? How do you want a city to manage? For who? We as a society have no answers for any of these questions, I submit, and there’s no point looking to architects for the answers unless we can tell them whether the answers are correct.
