The Three Classicists
RIBA, until 29 May
The Berlin Wall separated two sets of people who shared a history and language. In the same way, architecture has been divided into two groups, Classicists and Modernists, each convinced of their own rightness, and refusing to acknowledge the other’s existence. But suddenly it seems that they are offering each other flowers.
The exhibition Three Classicists opened recently with an array of Ionic volutes, Corinthian acanthus and sash windows. For the Royal Institute of British Architects this show would once have been as unthinkable as giving the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture to the Prince of Wales, and two major professional journals, having despised classicism for 50 years and more, have commented politely.
If the Mauer im Kopf (‘Wall in the Head’) has now come down, why was it there in the first place? To save the public from themselves, Modernists have always claimed, rather as Iron Curtain countries did in respect of capitalism.
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