Introduction Essay:'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...'but not the 1970s

摘要

This epithet of the nineteenth-century British novelist Charles Dickens - from the start of his novel A Tale of Two Cities - is often trotted out in historical retrospectives to portray decades of great material accomplishments or heightened emotional expression. The trouble is that it really does not apply to the architecture of the 1970s. The passions of the 1960s were far more elevated (destructively and constructively) than the so-called break with modernism proclaimed by Charles Jencks, "on July 15, 1972 at 3:32 p.m. (or thereabouts)."1 And the DeCon wave of "zero-degree" aesthetics practiced in the 1980s, was far worse in its conceits than anything imagined in the 1970s. At least the earlier decade could claim the work of Kahn, Scarpa, Tange, van Eyck, Utzon, and Barragan, none of whom need a first name. Two of Kahn's best works, the Phillips Exeter Academy Library and the Kimbell Art Museum were completed in 1972, and van Eyck's Mackintosh-inspired Hubertus House was completed at the end of the decade.