As a proponent of traditional design and architecture, I sometimes find myself in the position of wanting to defend the work of certain ‘modernist’ architects against the more strident ‘traditionalists’ on twitter and elsewhere who are as reflexively dismissive of all ‘modernist’ architecture as architectural progressives are of traditional forms. This blanket dismissal suggests to me that these critics haven’t really understood that what makes a building ‘traditional’ in part or whole is the degree to which it displays the underlying principles that constitute the ‘traditional’ in design, and are instead relying on superficial attributes or associations, such as era or style, in passing judgement. I always emphasise that traditional design has nothing to do with historicism or classicism, and that it is perfectly possible to do traditional architecture that is neither.

Traditional architectural principles are broadly hierarchical, and died in stages: first to go was ornament, but lack of ornament isn’t necessarily fatal to a building. Most of the architects of the period of early or ‘high’ modernism, though their work may be shorn of ornament, nevertheless preserved many of the other, arguably more foundational, principles of traditional design that were progressively lost over the following decades: natural materials, a degree of fractal scaling, local symmetries, a careful sense of proportion, plumb walls, rectilinear windows, and so on. Were you to bring them back, most of these architects would be appalled by the sterile, anti-human, parametric horrors of the architect-priests of our own time.

The modern cult of individual creative genius may have been disastrous for architecture as a whole, but that doesn’t mean that such figures don’t exist. And these architects certainly had their failures- the problem with free-floating, intuitive inspiration, as opposed to vernacular or classical design anchored in the communal rules of tradition and so almost infinitely forgiving of mediocrity, is that if the muse deserts you you aren’t left with much. But the best of the work of the best is, to me at least, undeniably beautiful, and represents a self-conscious but successful high-architectural invocation of the spirit of vernacular architecture. You might even, with some justification, call it ‘traditional modernism.’