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    Modern Traditional Architecture

    Letter to the Editor:
    Modern Traditional Architecture

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    Vitruvius wrote it over two thousand years ago – firmitas, utilitas, venustas – Strength, Usefulness, and Beauty. These are the three principals of all traditional architecture.

    For over two thousand years, architects designed buildings using the Classical orders of Architecture, which are derived from anthropomorphic proportion: the celebration of the human and nature. Then, fifty years ago, architecture schools stopped teaching this ageless tradition and, rather, espoused its abandonment.

    So, what have we come to? The most acclaimed accomplishments of our field, lauded by the glossy architecture publications, are funny-shaped buildings made of glass and shiny metals; buildings void of their locations and their cultures; buildings that could be anywhere – Columbus, Los Angeles, or Dubai.

    Columbus Underground is celebrating Design and Architecture this week, brought to you by our friends at the Hamilton Parker Company. All this week we’re featuring articles on local architects, designers, creators, big thinkers and other creative professionals.

    So, I ask – have we architects lost our relevancy ?

    If we want to be relevant in the world that lay beyond the glossy publication readership, we need to reexamine our understanding of Architecture as being a therapeutic self-isolating process like much of contemporary Painting or Sculpture, and look at it as a process more akin to Cooking – creative innovation within a recipe passed down from generation to generation.

    Contrary to Modernist assertions, traditional architecture does not only embody a mere “historical knowledge,” but the technical praxis essentially related to the human condition, which tends to be perennial and universal in an anthropological sense.

    Traditional architecture is practiced by the conscious subscription to vocabularies of formal types and parts, and the grammars, with which they can be assembled. Classical and vernacular grammars differ in their compositional rigor, material character, proportional relationship among whole and parts, and in the sophistication of their ornamentation. Modernism tells us it is okay if a museum looks like a factory, or if a church looks like an industrial warehouse. Modernist dogma, in its iconoclastic quest to shatter timeless forms of communication and understanding, has promoted an almost total break-down of language through a refutation of building types, which, in turn, has made it impossible for buildings and whole cities to function meaningfully, let alone programmatically.

    By its rejection of traditional language, Modernist architecture in its puritanical form denies the capability of communicating objective content to a general audience, i.e. symbolism. Rather, it consigns itself chiefly to: (a) expressing the rejection of tradition by undermining expectations – shock; (b) stimulating empty emotional responses with no particular content – novelty; or (c) encrypting the private theories of the architect (or should I say “Star-chitect”) – elitism. Implicit in the shunning of traditional forms is the idea that nothing permanent about the human condition can be learned from previous generations or can be taught to future generations. This idea runs counter to common sense, as we naturally want to teach our children what we have learned about how to live well.

    The average layman, who has not received an architectural education and has not learned to decipher Modernism, generally understands and appreciates traditional architecture but remains mystified by Modernism.

    Traditional architecture remains a living language, although many architects have lost the will to learn its grammar and use its vocabulary.

    I am asked why buildings by Gehry and Koolhaas are so popular. This is so for a number of reasons – chief among them is that they are trendy, titillating novelty items, which garner a lot of press attention. However, they are destined to look dated within a short period of time just as the buildings which were trendy in the 1960s and 1970s look dated today.

    The practice of traditional architecture invites each generation with an opportunity to innovate that which has been handed down, and offers the past as a measure against which to judge a generation’s endeavors. The Renaissance, perhaps the best known of these efforts, produced some of the most beautiful buildings in history. No one could seriously denigrate the achievements of Renaissance architects with the charge that they were turning back the clock.

    It is not insignificant that there have been no public protests against traditional architecture; people, rather, protest its absence.

    Nothing is more tiresome than ugliness. I want to suggest that what is essential to the art of Architecture is not so much the sophistication of ideas but the beauty of the result; that is, of what the senses can detect, from the detail to the whole, without preparation or guided explanation of any kind.

    Traditional architecture has continued to serve human endeavors throughout time, place, and political regime; there is no reason why this should not be the case in the future.

    David B. Meleca
    President
    Meleca Architecture, Inc.

    From September 23rd to September 29th, Columbus Underground is Celebrating Design Week, brought to you by the Hamilton Parker Company. With a 15,000 square foot showroom located just outside Downtown at 1865 Leonard Ave, the Hamilton Parker Company has been your go-to local resource for home and business improvement projects of all sizes and budgets. Find out more at www.hamiltonparker.com.

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