The emperor's new clothes. Concept

There is nothing unusual when in a field - even one of the complexity of architecture - new trends emerge from time to time, of longer or shorter duration, embodied by prominent creative personalities who leave behind them a body of work, a school, disciples or epigones. More often than not, they are part of a general movement of ideas, encompassing all creative genres and involving all the means of production of the time.

Certainly, if a history were to consider the processes by which architecture ('a faithful mirror of its time') materializes as a kind of mineral-geometric precipitate of the chemistry of social life, an artificial topography resulting from the tectonic movements of each shift in a cultural paradigm, a landmark built at the intersection of epochs, morphological studies could reveal clues to the mechanisms that make buildings emerge from this whirlpool of influences and confluences of ideas, techniques and fashions.

For us Europeans of the 21st century, there can be no doubt that the Renaissance was a watershed that decisively steered our destiny towards the slope on which we are still moving today. It was also then, for the first time in history, that architects began to design not according to the materials or construction techniques, architectural programs and tastes of the time, but following a multiple, heterogeneous mental construct, often formulated in fragments, but irresistible: that of emulating classical Greco-Roman architecture in the name of a humanist ideal. The result, of course, is not ancient, but Renaissance architecture, but the leap has been made from premodern, organic building - even in the case of the most artistically refined, technically-prodigious Gothic cathedral - to modern, conceptual ^{architecture1}.

What followed is well known. The sophisticated combinatorial play with the elements of the classical language of architecture, until it was codified and transformed into the systematized canon of treatises that was to dominate European architectural expression until a century ago, first passed through that brief and incandescent episode of Mannerism.

Read the full text in issue 6 / 2014 of Arhitectura magazine

NOTES:

1 Medieval conceptualism is, however, a branch of scholasticism. Conceptual art today, also called conceptualism, has only casual links with philosophy.