“On the screens of my sharpest young students are no longer the parametric pinwheels or blobby billows that were a digitally enhanced memory of the last self-consciously curated consensus style, so-called Deconstructivism. Instead it’s all 1986, all the time: James Stirling, Charles Moore, Raimund Abraham, Oswald Ungers, and Aldo Rossi at his most Giorgio de Chirico.”

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“Some of this is the usual fascination with the aesthetics of the era of one’s birth. (Up next: early ’90s Neil Denari, AIA, Michael Rotondi, FAIA, and Tom Kundig, FAIA?) But the rest is something else. It’s a search by a digitally disembodied and displaced generation for what those titans of the ’80s cared about: a substantial materiality in stone, steel, and glass; a sense of place and position in landscape and cityscape; a feeling for the tactile, the sensory, the phenomenal; and the intimation (often through a classicizing shorthand of arcades and colonnades) that all buildings have not just historicist parts, but historical pasts.”

Thomas de Monchaux, The Style of Substance, Architect, April 2015