The Classical City online journal is jointly edited by Anton Glikin and Youry Makoussinsky and published by The Classical City Association.
The Classical City online journal is jointly edited by Anton Glikin and Youry Makoussinsky and published by The Classical City Association.
It is a pity that in recognising that the architectural profession has recently moved closer to Prince Charles' views on climate change, energy use and sustainability, Jonathan Glancey repeats the pseudo-marxist and philistine modernist taunt that espousing classical architecture is inherently regressive: "rather like an aging railway enthusiast who insists that only the Great Western was any good" ("The view from Highgrove", G2, 23 Apri http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/apr/23/prince-charles-richard-rogers-riba.
Classicism was never merely some local stage on a long march of technological progress, but, rather, was a brilliantly intuited and formulated idea within art itself. As such, it can never appropriately be deemed either technologically or culturally "obsolete". It is too good, too humanly enriching to die - which is precisely why, although invented by the Greeks millenia ago, its principles and its possibilities return in wave after renaissance wave to challenge entrenched hegemonies in country after country. It so happens that the century-old hegemony of modernism has bequeathed the most disastrous, the most artistically sterile and socially impoverishing (anti-)architectural system of all time, constituting, in its way, a perfectly dehumanised and alienating byproduct of a century of terrible totalitarianisms and world warfare. As such, it, not classicism, rightly and fairly stands today's perfect candidate for history's rubbish bin.
2009-04-30 23:03:37
