Style for the Time

Definition

"Style for the time" is the modernist doctrine that each age has one authentic architecture, that building in the forms of a past style is therefore false or immoral, and that the architect's task is to invent the form proper to the present. Goldberger treats it as the central claim of early modernism's polemicists — Le Corbusier's Towards a New Architecture and When the Cathedrals Were White, Gropius, Sant'Elia — and as an axiom that "sound[s] impressive when you first hear them but turn out not to mean very much once you try to probe them deeply." His objections are historical and linguistic: modernism did not have "sole possession" of the early twentieth century, which is equally defined by the era's traditional buildings (Carrère and Hastings's New York Public Library, Warren and Wetmore's Grand Central, Rogers's Memorial Quadrangle at Yale, McKim's Pennsylvania Station, Gilbert's Woolworth Building); "styles are languages, and languages continue to change and evolve," so a great architect working in a historical style (Jefferson, Lutyens, Krier, Robertson) "say[s] new things in an existing language." Goldberger nevertheless concedes that a zeitgeist exists — "there really is a spirit of the time; it is just not so narrow as Le Corbusier or Walter Gropius would have had us believe" — and that it appears in interior programmes and technology even when the stylistic surface is historical.

Key Thinkers

• Paul Goldberger — attacks the doctrine while retaining a broader zeitgeist thesis.
• Le Corbusier — the doctrine's most influential spokesman.
• Robert Venturi — complexity and contradiction as the counter to the doctrine's purism.
• Walter Gropius — with Le Corbusier, a target of Goldberger's critique. (PAGE NEEDED — see log.)

Related Concepts

• modernism — the movement built on the doctrine.
• tradition-vs-innovation — the debate the doctrine formalises.
• tradition — the historical language the doctrine declares exhausted.
• authenticity — the value the doctrine claims for the new.
• style — the term whose historicity the doctrine denies.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• source-notes/goldberger-2009-why-architecture-matters — ch. 6 (pp. 138–44) dismantles the doctrine and offers the broader zeitgeist thesis.

Open Questions

• If every age has a spirit but no single authentic style, what work does "time" actually do in architectural judgment?
• Can the doctrine be separated from its moralism, or does "style for the time" always imply a judgment about the architect's integrity?