Doppler Effect: Architecture is Sound, not a Train

There are four elements found in the Doppler Effect: the vehicle, the sound, the bystander, and the sound producer. In this case, like the article, we will call the vehicle a train. The train is unable to break from the tracks and is propelled by a constant stream of energy. In architecture that energy is a perpetual changing of the guard bringing in new ideas from a new, changing world. The train itself exists only for a moment of time in that particular position and will never return again. The bystander is us, the public, who experience the sound that the train is emanating. That sound, produced by thousands of architects attempting to change the field of architecture is what we hear. Each sound unique and each sound representative of a different, new stage of architecture. 

As a bystander in the 1950s, the train is about to arrive at your position along the track, leave its impression on you, then continue on unimpeded. The sound is high pitched, "hot" architecture, as it arrives. For a bystander from the modern day to return to the same position that the bystander of the 1950s was in, the train has long since passed, the once considered high pitch is now a low roar, having become normalized over time. That same moment of architecture that was "hot" is now "cool."

Somol and Whiting write that "one alternative, minimalism, would be a cool art form" which I agree with in this moment in time, but at the turn of the twentieth century, Ca Brutta, one of the first deornamentalized buildings, was vilified by the people of Milan and at that time would have been considered "hot" architecture. Terragni's Danteum was never built, at the time it would be considered "hot" architecture, but now after one hundred years, we would look on it as a "cool" building. The idea that a "hot" or "cool" building can be defined is impossible. The separation between them is caused by a break from normality that in turn makes us question the reason for its existence until the reason for other architecture's existence becomes based on the initial precedent.