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Every December talking heads (or screens) trumpet “Everything Has Changed”. But this year it is true. Imminent inoculations may bring back human contact, but the Coronavirus Year has changed us.
I think 2020 ended the 20th Century in architecture. Architecture never leads in pivotal periods. Modernism was birthed by a Western World leaving monarchies and diving into the Industrial Revolution: it caused neither.
Today, a century of nearly unquestioned aesthetic correctness in architecture may be changing. The world of celebrated design has always been desperate for relevance as it has little tangible value beyond the fundamental joy that it offers everyone. The oxymoron of design being an essential luxury found reason in the 20th Century when it was seen as the cutting edge of a cultural move to a bright, clean, Modern future.