I remain, for reasons not entirely clear, obsessed with artists (architects, writers, etc.) who cultivate tradition and modernity in their work. Like all obsessions, it is certainly unhealthy and, with some expenditure of time and money, could likely be exposed by a good therapist as nothing more than a hapless attempt to placate some authority figure from childhood. But until then, it’s cheaper than therapy and carries the promise of answering one of the intractable questions in art: What is the relation between the ephemeral waves of a transient modernism and the perennial undertow of tradition? Accomplishing this in one’s work is difficult at best. Discussing it with any clarity is harder still, either to analyze or to prescribe. Yet its elusive quality only fuels the obsessive fire, so I continue seeking this shadowy and indeterminate grail.

…as we become more and more accustomed to the idea that architecture is supposed to give us a kind of emotional high, are we not at risk of needing more and more of it, all the time, upping the ante as buildings that once would have excited us now become routine? In the end, this may turn out to be the real way we pay a price for our new fixation—that we need each piece of architecture to be more and more different, to make a louder and louder statement, to attract our interest.
– Paul Goldberger

One of the most destructive aspects of modern culture is the association of “originality” – new merely for the sake of being new – with true creativity. Prior to modern times, a work of art (architecture, music, literature) was understood as ineluctably tied to what had come before it; the new work might differ considerably from its predecessors, but breaking the rules alone was not enough to guarantee publicity and acclaim. Today, terms like “avant-garde,” “edgy” and “original” designate an uncritically positive response, implying a complete break with traditional forms. The work of the most widely published architects reflects this, symbolically if not functionally: Frank Gehry, Steven Holl, Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas to name a few. Constant pressure from an insatiable media anxious to uncover new trends only requires the work to appear unrelated to the previous trend. The paradox is, as the critic Edward Rothstein notes, “A rebellious act is as beholden to the tradition it rejects as a conservative one is to the tradition it upholds: that is what the avant-garde has been about and why it can now seem so formulaic.”

Tradition implies expanse and history; trend implies brevity and sensation. Tradition invokes age; trend speaks of youth. Tradition demands reference to the past; trend demands iconoclasm and newness. Tradition is based on resemblance—how this artwork or that aspect of culture invokes or relies on what has come before; trend is based on difference—how this artwork is distinct from what has come before.
– Edward Rothstein

There is a certain approach one can find with some frequency in modern history in which new creative territories are introduced without having thrown tradition overboard. In ceramics, the mid-century Swedish master Stig Lindberg re-balanced proportions and added exuberant abstract color schemes to forms grounded in both ancient civilizations and nature. In furniture, the inimitable Hans Wegner reigned supreme, along with George Nakashima and Sam Maloof, who empowered colonial American furniture crafts with an insouciance entirely modern in spirit. Isamu Noguchi breathed this spirit of new and old into everything he touched (sculpture, lighting, ceramics, furniture and who knows what else) including, I suspect, the very fabric of his daily life. In music, no one wove the warp and weft of tradition and modernity into a new and lasting whole cloth better than the Russian émigré Igor Stravinsky—in opposition to Arnold Schoenberg who vainly sought to transform not only writing, but hearing, music. In poetry, old and new entwine throughout the work of Seamus Heaney, whose emphatically contemporary verse brings place, history and human emotion into crisp focus. The list could of course be longer, and I’m avoiding entirely dance, prose and the visual and conceptual arts, but these artists set out the general idea.

Case histories like these reveal that tradition – from the Latin tradere, to hand over, usually from one generation to the next – can be closed or open. Closed tradition mandates subjugation to authority, an armor against the incursion of new ideas, while open tradition promotes evolution through new technology and insight. Closed traditions originate from a static, centralized position of power and are accompanied with lifeless ceremony and ritual. Open traditions, always integrating new ideas, thrive on the continuous and indeterminate shifting and re-distribution of focus and power. And it is closed systems that are the breeding grounds for trends. Though the power behind trends appears to move from one point of origin to another, in fact they germinate from the same reactionary culture, driven by a lethal dose of consumerism.

As data and image supplanted the authority of the actual, foreground and background collapsed into each other; we entered what writer G. S. Trow years ago dubbed “the context of no context,” a zone of relativism untethered to the old material world and its various orders. And with that change our relation to the former world – to history, to literature – altered, subtly but absolutely. All interactions and transactions now take place in a different gravitational field, and if the man on the street won’t acknowledge it, the artist has to.
– Sven Birkerts

One of the problems with a severely abstracted and un-articulated architecture is that it typically contains few if any reference points to our human identity, embedded as we are in a particular set of earthly circumstances, a concept abbreviated as “context.” Architects and critics afflicted with Art-envy dismiss the consideration of context; to them it represents a simple-minded cage clipping their creative wings, limiting personal expression and hobbling the flight of imagination. But I would argue that context is in some way all we have, and as strained and forced as it may be to dredge up its tiny shards buried deep in our culture of “no context,” it is both an act of cultural sustainability and resistance to honor them as ancestral guides. Indeed, this is possibly the only place from which artists can find the necessary “traction,” as Birkerts calls it, to creatively move ahead.

Architecture is not a goal. Architecture is for life and pleasure and work and for people. [It is] the picture frame, not the picture.
– William Wurster

Being prescriptive about the making of any form of open tradition is to wade into treacherous waters, where one is more likely than not to end up perversely circumscribing a closed system. First advanced in the brilliant book Houses Generated by Patterns for a competition in Peru, Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language, and its near religious variants, is an architectural example of a specific open system extrapolated into such universal detail that the result is a closed system of pattern-book authoritarianism. In spite of this peril, I would propose three general – and open – topics for consideration, under which a building could be asked how it is connected (or disconnected) from its ancestors:

Topography & Boundary – What is the relationship to the earth and where does the space of inhabitation end

Typology & Culture – What precedents exist in the history of building, spatially or culturally

Tectonics & Scale – As Peter Rice has asked, is “the trace of the hand in building” present in some way

Take, for example, the contemporary Japanese architecture of Terunobu Fujimori, whose work effectively presents this dialogue in built form. The buildings, each one an ingenious fusion of ancient and modern, possess the visceral strength and bewitching enchantment of places that are at once intimately familiar and wondrously new.

Three questions. Not much, I admit, for all the effort involved, but I’m convinced these questions can take us closer to understanding not only our present work, but how that work is transforming the very tradition to which it is indebted. As Louis Kahn used to say to himself, “How’m I doing, Corbusier?”