A hard question. Look to other fields and see what concerns they are grappling with: not just contemporary art and literature, but medicine, retail, movies, automotive design, heavy industry, banking....

personal mythology...

There hasn't really been much of anything new since maya came out, and that was a tragedy

my personal belief is that contemporary architecture today reflects a "branching out from" or "reactions to" modernism, but not necessarily a break-away "original thought" movement...so, if you ask me, if you must qualify it, call it modernism...

look for technology (computer/data/v.r) and environment as being the source for new thoughts and movement...but we are still under the modern umbrella...

Thank god for the lack of -isms right now. I think what destroyed architecture in the 20th century was this predeliction to always find a "style." Architecture became more about how clever you could be in writing than it was about tectonics. That's why people like Eisenman, Stern, Libeskind moved to the fore--they could talk Derrida, they could play with symbols and meta-meanings. But they only produced formal car-wrecks.

Rem Koolhaas said a few years ago "the semantic nightmare is over." Thank fucking god. It only produced atrocious architecture.

I see architects now moving back toward an architecture based in tectonics, materials, fabrication and making. They're using new (but also old) technologies to create inventive spaces and experiences. Peter Zumthor often uses the phrase "no ideas except in things." I believe it. Architecture is physical and experiential -- it's not about how good you can talk.

I hope architects once again become the master builders they used to be.

Master Builders??

really? this is the great aspiration for the future of architecture?

i remember my main introduction to 'contemporary' architecture being the 'master builders' of Wright, Corbu and Mies. so, we want a return to a few singular individuals? or is that so different from the current position?

remember, it is the critics, the Charles Jenckses who spend their time giving names to periods and phases; not the architects.

architecture has always been about ideas and ideation. from Palladio, to Inigo Jones, to Wren, to Ledoux, to Corbusier, to the present day.

farwest1 - your absolutism of who is good and who is bad leaves me quite cold.

[DIS]honesty...

I think that once the economy slows down and these architects run out of big building projects the isms will come back pretty hard.

dlb,

You're misunderstanding me.

I had in mind the historic notion of a master-builder, coming from the medieval and renaissance period: a building designer who was also intimately engaged with the process of construction, who had his or her hands in the soil, so to speak. I wasn't talking about the "heroes" of the modern period -- nor the Howard Roarke/objectivist version of the architect, which I personally dislike.

I believe that new fabrication technologies will allow architects to have greater control over the materials that they design. I too dislike the cult of personality that architecture generates.

And I'm not saying that architecture should abandon ideas. I think ideas and ideation are crucial to architecture. I very much appreciate that those ideas now seem to be coming from tectonics, structure, material, and the haptic realm. I felt that when those ideas were based in "texts" before "material," architecture fell flat.

so, farwest, you want to practice modern architecture in a traditional way, ignoring all of the exigencies of the contemporary construction industry. how quaint.

i admire your idealism.

oy. no. i guess i'm not being clear.

what i meant was that new technologies and new forms of construction have the potential to engage architects more directly with the buildings they're making, even to the point of fabricating parts of them.

i'm thinking of someone like william massie, who designs and then fabricates many of his own projects.