Can we really not move forward? This is the element of modernism that the prince most misunderstands. Culture must have momentum. It has to look ahead. That is its point. By definition, culture acts as a commentary on its own time, but occasionally it has to look beyond it, to anticipate what is to come.Thus, Aspden is making the argument that culture should be progressive. Not because there is some teleological goal of goodness toward which it must strive, but simply because it needs to be going somewhere.
So I ask of our readers: First, must culture really always be going somewhere? And second, if that is the case, is going "backward" an acceptable option, or is antiquarianism antithetical to the future-oriented movement of culture?
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Ok, so I do have a bit to say about the article proper. In defending modern architecture - of which I am not a fan, though not as much of a hater as is the Prince of Wales - Aspden lists five works which he suggests exemplify all that is good in modern architecture. Frankly, he seems to have picked an odd lot. If I had to score each of them on a scale of one to five, the distribution would cover the full scale. At a five comes the Sydney Opera House, with beautiful well-proportioned curves which evoke the ships and sea which meet in the harbor. At a four is Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, a nifty house embedded into the woods directly over a waterfall. It would get a five except (a) if you're in the wrong mood, it can look like a spaceship landed in the forest, rather out of place and (b) I'm told the structure is having some aging problems due to its unique location. Still, so far so good. With three stars is the Barcelona Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe. It's all right, with a quiet, cool kind of look, but nothing to get excited about. But then Aspden's picks get odd: the Villa Savoie, to which I'd give only two stars. It looks like a white box with windows built up on stilts because, well, it is. But at least it just sits still and doesn't try to do anything else. Earning a single star is the heinous Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which looks like a bad conglomeration of metal boxes spent too much time in the sun and melted. Really, you put art in something that ugly? I'll take Washington's National Gallery over that any day of the week and twice on Sundays. So while there might be something to Aspden's point that modern architecture need not be as bad as the Prince of Wales claims, he's picked some odd examples to illustrate his point.
I can kind of understand Aspden's point about culture looking forward. A culture usually draws on the past for inspiration, but unless it adds something of its own from the present, the new work is dull in some way (don't ask me to describe it any better detail). For instance, if you want examples of dead traditionalism in architecture, just look at much of 19th century "revival" architecture, whether it be Greek revival, Gothic revival, whatever. There are exceptions, but many of them are mere copies of historical models, and they just feel out of place.
How, though, does a culture look beyond the present to something that does not exist yet? That's still not clear to me.
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