alt Hacker NewsI think the part of this post that is a push back at the “trad critique” doesn’t really work: at a point the author basically says that modernism has its hold due to being a (and I’m paraphrasing uncharitably here) cheap and easy shot at architectural respectability, which is not only not a defense of it, but pretty much the point of the “trad critique”
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some_random • today at 3:09 PM
It's a (as described in the article) conservative belief so it must be condemned and disavowed especially if it has merit.
I guess the critique of the trad critique is that there is no single clear bright line between beautiful buildings everywhere and some sudden arrival of gray boxes everywhere. The beautiful buildings often had conflicting ideologies behind them, it was not a static landscape of eternal proportion and principle that was one day toppled when some evil people decided to bring misery to all. Of course this is an exaggeration.
The whole thing is anyway an ideological thing today as it was back then. The online trad architecture aesthetic is associated with the right wing, who see it as a return to order from today's decadence and overly guilt ridden elite zeitgeist. Urbanism and human scale architecture is associated with certain parts of the left who admire Nordic and Western European social democracies like the Netherlands and Denmark against what they see as the hegemonic capitalist state of the US.
The point is, architecture doesn't live in a vacuum, it is inextricably linked to political and ideological tribalism, and choices in architecture are expressions of what other tribe one rejects and consciously differentiates from etc.