From End to End to Midpoint

From my perspective, I guess contemporary architecture would be the organic midpoint between historical architecture and modern architecture when people talk about contemporary architecture decades years or hundreds of years later.

Lots of historical buildings, especially the residential buildings, no matter their envelope or their interior space, are formed by their local climates and material culture. While modern architecture (and postmodern architecture) broke a lot of disciplines of historical architecture and there are lots of sayings came out, such as Less is More, Less is Boring, A house is a machine for living in.  Obviously, we can easily come to the conclusion that pioneer architects in that era tried to find a new way to express architecture, some were totally against historical ways, some of them got inspiration from historical styles, like curve line, some specific elements. There also are some architects highlighted technologies which generated from Industrial Revolution. I would like to come to the conclusion that almost all of them focus on the visual part of architecture or taking use of advanced technology. 

Because it was the start of modern architecture which is so different from historical architecture. Actually, modern architecture needed to build its own foundation. Because of the limitation of human, they only can solve one problem very well at one time. Besides, from another perspective, only the extremely crazy stuff is powerful enough to get enough attention and then affect the world compared with the stuff with a little improvement. So the simple, pure form was outstanding and had an extreme impact on lots of architects, even the whole world. However, with time goes by, after this pure, simple style has become a common sense among currents architects who start paying more attention to other aspects, such as climate, material culture. It also includes the topics talked in previous weeks, like space justice. 

Although architects are trying to go back to consider these traditional elements including climate and material culture, what is truly interesting and making true innovation is that they are combining technologies and these aspects from a broader diachronic perspective instead of mimicking historical buildings.