Using Australia as her focus, Marissa Looby, in a recent article for the Australian Design Review, argues that the disappearance of architectural styles, combined with the proliferation of various guidelines and building codes, has created a new breed of architect: The New Radical Pragmatist. Her article "The New Radical Pragmatist (On Validation)" is reprinted here.
The Architectural Review (December, 1955) first published Reyner Banham’s epochal and pivotal article, ‘The New Brutalism’, in which the critic pointed to the rise of a new architectural style. He also described an influx of -isms that were becoming increasingly conspicuous to the discipline, stemming from the then contemporary model of an art historian and their influence on the architectural historian-as-observer of the architectural profession. Banham incisively suggested that any proposition of the term ‘new’ has an unequivocal relationship to the past, so much so that in advocating for a new -ism an architectural theoretician must defend their claim with historic fact. Ironically, Banham acknowledged that even ‘The New Brutalism’ title derived from The Architectural Review’s analysis of the International Style in the postwar article, ‘The New Empiricism’. He stated: “[the] ability to deal with such fine shades of historical meaning is in itself a measure of our handiness with the historical method today, and the use of phrases of the form ‘The New X-ism’ – where X equals any adjectival root – became commonplace in the early 1950s in fourth year studios and other places where architecture is discussed, rather than practised.”
The -ism was ostensibly a Modernist construct, with commonplace examples popping up in art and architecture, such as Cubism, Futurism and Surrealism. The construct, since the mid-fifties (taking, for the sake of argument, Banham’s postulation as a starting point) has gradually developed into a cliche, as architecture has continued to observe, construct, postulate, reinstate and evaluate a number of styles and movements, allocating each with its own snappy moniker. The new Brutalist style, deriving from two key protagonists – English architects Peter and Alison Smithson – was a movement that could be genealogically linked to Modernism and as such was locked in an Oedipal complex to free itself from its forebear. Modernism, as a style that defined pre- and postwar periods, requires little introduction. Charles Jencks may have once famously exclaimed the “death of Modernism” and birth of Postmodernism, pinpointing an exact date and time (July 15, 1972 at precisely 3:32pm) when the Minoru Yamasaki-designed Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St Louis, Missouri was demolished, but Modernism’s stronghold may still ruminate in the present in adapted forms. In Japan, the Metabolist style also sprung from Modernism at the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) conference, Hoddesdon, 1951, using the megastructure as a technological and formal aesthetic to symbolise the movement. Also worthy of note, was the Deconstructivist movement from the 1980s – a point at which architecture slid down a slippery slope of Post-Structuralist semiotics – with its beginnings established in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1988), curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley. The exhibition comprised a haphazardly mixed group of architects, all of whom distanced themselves from the -ism soon after.
