Not So Smart Buildings (Part 2)?

(See Not So Smart Buildings Part 1 from 10/29/08)

Over the years I've worked many a home tour, often as a docent, which has happily led to contact with tour takers, strangers, and the occasional exchange.
Them: "I love these old homes, but I couldn't live in one."
Me: "Oh yeah, why not?"
Them: (some combination of) "They're too busy/It's all a bit much/I need a simpler palette."
And these are the sympathetic folk, who can hold their balance in a Queen Anne parlor, unsettled by Malibu tile and William Morris inspired wallpaper?!

What can I say? We're living in a era wherein concrete floors and a field of white is championed as good design (and it might be, for the few it truly serves). The return to minimalism in contemporary building and design is likely, typically, a response to preceding movements, the playful, sometimes cloying, affectations of post-modernism, and the excessive structural pursuits of computer age architecture.

While I may seem overtaken by the sentiment classique, it is rather that I resist the embalmers, those who would label that which falls outside today's International Style redux as ideologically astern.

This current fetish, for atomic age modernism, the boxy and planar, clerestory windows and machine age materials is fad, standard fad, neither the divinations of the design gods nor the ultimate vessel for 21st century man, but merely another point on the architectural continuum.

Ironically, the era recalled eschewed historical precedents and references, and sought to formulate new concepts of form and space. The revival amounts to sincere appreciation, nostalgia, marketing snap, and cyclicity. The revival is, at times, pure cliche.

(Five images of six wonderful buildings from six different eras.)