ABSTRACT
As the modernist consensus of the immediate post-war period gave way to skepticism in the late 1950s and early 1960s, modern architecture faced critiques both from within (e.g. Team X) and without (Post-Modernism). The political crises and social transformations (civil rights and colonial independence movements, cold and hot wars, and economic upheavals) of these decades, alongside the not-quite-utopic results of a once radical modernism which was increasingly absorbed into capitalism and the state, precipitated profound reconsiderations of the ethical basis of architectural practice. By the early 1960s, many architects and intellectuals responded to a perceived homogeneity in Western architecture by seeking new vocabularies for architectural production. Some sought to bring new energy to modern architecture by adopting non-Western formal languages, others argued that vernacular architectures, which had already been celebrated by Le Corbusier and others, represented a “native genius” that had been suppressed by modernism’s pervasive technological determinism, while others still called for a return of ornament and guration in order to enable architecture to fulll its historical role as a conveyer of meaning and marker of social order.1
