3

Beauty in architecture is a reward: it is achieved when a project seeks not to please, but allows itself to be invested with symbols that transcend it, that endow it with timeless meaning. In works by twentieth-century masters, architecture’s defining features involved a struggle between reason and mystery, imbuing the architectural act with a tragic dimension. The sagas of Wright, Le Corbusier, Kahn, and Aalto were composed of unexpected, full-fledged, sovereign works that disdained technical or practical causality as well as any facileness or compromise. They were the last ones to raise architectural projects to the status of a heroic act. That prestige has passed. Postmodernism put an end to it by deposing architectural projects and vulgarizing architectural taste ( “vulgar” in the double senses of popular and coarse). Ever since, the vaunted ideal is outrageous license: unconstrained by traditional skills, collective memory, and struggles—or by any social responsibility or authority—most architectural projects have finally become absolutely, unconditionally lightweight. Comedy, has bested tragedy. Great sagas have been replaced by quips, and architecture’s initiatory pleasure has given way to trivial entertainment. Why and how has the ambition for universal comprehension been replaced by the complacency of global razzmatazz? Understanding this upheaval is necessary to envision what new system of values may emerge from the ruins of the old.