An architectural language I find it increasingly hard to get very excited about these style battles, and I suspect a lot of people feel the same way. Thomas Gordon Smith spoke at the conference, and he sounded entirely sane. (As one nationally known architect said to me on the way out of the hall, “The dragon turns out not to be such a dragon.”) He presented Classicism as an architectural language of well-understood conventions, a language that can and should be used inventively. I’ve visited his school and liked the student work.
I suppose you could make the analogy with English, another language of conventions in which it is, nevertheless, possible to write original poetry. If you stretch the English language, or the language of architecture, too far too fast, what you get is an uncomprehending public. As Charles Moore put it, avant-garde architecture can be like Esperanto—an invented language understood only by a small international claque of appreciators.
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