Neo-Modernism, Back To The Future Again

IT IS A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED, that a young man in a good architecture school, must be designing 1960s-style buildings. That's the impression you get from Dwell, which I read recently in the airport. The issue I read featured sober, straightforward and attractive new houses that all looked like they were built in the 1960s. The only exception was a silly article on the Junior Starchitects MRDV, with quotes like this: "We want to position our work outside of architecture, as a clear piece of sociology and ecology."

To see what that means, click here. Shades of 1960s British loonies Archigram.

UPDATE: More on Neo-1960s here, here, here and below.

More on the Starchitect / Simpler divide here (Post-Katrina housing fits designers' agendas. But can the city live with it?):

No one has yet picked MVRDV's mailbox or its alternative version, which looks suspiciously like a boat upended by Katrina.

Several architects said they were appalled by MVRDV's proposals, which play more to the academy than the needs of displaced residents, and may be uninhabitable.

"That's graphic design, not architecture," Timberlake said. Bingler was more blunt: "When are we going to reach the point when architects say, 'This is unprofessional?' . . . It may even be unethical."

Bingler said his firm, Concordia, had steered clear of trendy concepts. Its design features a peaked roof, but one that slopes in five directions.

A roof "that slopes in five directions" — thank God they got over the trendiness.