ABSTRACT

“Nothing comes from nothing,” Quatremére de Quincy wrote in his definition of “type.” In terms of what most architects, clients and critics were doing between 1945 and 1965, or thought they were doing, the common wisdom said the opposite. Participants in postwar architecture culture did not wish to see themselves as working from a model, according to a type, in a specific style. The ban on “style” extended from the imitation of a past culture’s forms and philosophies, with which figures like Quatremère was identified, to the notion that their contemporary mode of work could be called a “style.”