The Idiot's Guide To Architecture

摘要

When architects want to rubbish traditional design they call it "pastiche". They roll out the P word and think that's enough to damn it. It's so easy. But when Bradford metropolitan council has a policy that says "new development must not resort to pastiche", when Hertfordshire council stipulates that "proposals that provide a pastiche ... should be discouraged", when someone senior in English Heritage announces that there's "no contest" between "good modern design and pastiche", it's serious. When pastiche is something officials want to stop, perhaps we ought to think carefully about what it means.rnIn the dictionary, pastiche is "a composition made up of bits of other works or imitations of another's style". If this sounds bad, why? Sometime in the 20th century we got the strange idea that for art to be modern it has to be unlike anything done before. This is, of course, ridiculous. All art is based on ideas, influences and bits from other artists. In architecture, this applies to modernist as well as traditional design. How many buildings have glass walls like Mies van der Rohe? How many use curvy Corbusian outside stairs or floating cubic walls?