ABSTRACT
Since Heinrich Wolfflin’s Principles of Art History (1915), there has been a tendency to read aesthetic shifts in art and architecture as a cyclical recurrence between restraint and exuberance. Renaissance and Baroque, Art Nouveau and International Style Modernism, Brutalism and Pop Post-Modernism, Digital Formalism and Neo-Modernism. Although this last cycle is still too close to fully see, one can put forward several observations to consider this most recent pair in a different relation. As Tom Conley observes in the work of Henri Focillon, “the Romanesque and Gothic, two dominant and contrastive styles, often inflect each other. They crisscross and sometimes fold vastly different sensibilities into each other” (Conley, 1993). The pairing of Digital Formalism and Neo-Modernism is similar in this regard. They are less cyclical responses than simultaneous reflections of each other.
