He wrote “feels limited, exclusive, stiff…political content is feather-light” and features work from too many of, the expected star-architects. Hawthorne also highlighted one significant failure, which was to explore contemporary implications of digital design and networked culture and the resultant “nascent postmodern revival“. Is this perhaps the description of a architecture of #New Aesthetics?…
“the way younger designers think about history, memory and intellectual recycling is poised to change architecture in some profound ways. For architects in their 20s and 30s, born into a digital age, architectural culture no longer spins in cycles of fashion and taste…they dip into architectural history, effortlessly pull out buildings, theories, images and texts and reuse or remake them in a carefree and pragmatic way. As the wall text accompanying the installation by FAT puts it, ‘FAT and their collaborators are relaxed about copying: the sources are out there to plunder.’…This approach to history and memory is very different from the one the postmodern pioneers Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Charles Moore and Aldo Rossi brought to architecture in the 1970s and ’80s…Chipperfield’s exhibition, though, never explores the implications of this important shift in much depth“…