ABSTRACT
This chapter notes that the current histories of architecture treat a building as the product of the influences of the time it was built. It accepts architecture’s place within the modern system of the arts, which allows it to become an art of self-expression as architects use technology to build their inventive forms that follow functions. Disregarded is architecture’s role in the urbanism that serves the purposes people pursue as the public, common good. Modernism’s historicist-based narrative and practice feature stylistic ruptures across time leading inexorably to the apotheosis of Modernism, and it argues that using earlier styles inhibits progress. It also rejects earlier theories of architecture and the traditional belief in which the beautiful stands as the counterpart to the good and true principles found in innumerable global and historical variations. Six propositions from that rejected tradition are offered to oppose Modernists’ determinism and restore architecture as a civil art: restore reason and the imitation of nature in the classical sense that allies the beautiful with seeking justice and the truth; stress the role of tradition and its essential assistant, invention; and do the same for the role of tectonics and technology in the art of building.
