Architecture and Movement: the Dynamic Experience of Buildings and Landscapes

摘要

In recent years a whole legion of dragons has been slain by a new generation of architectural historians and critics. Those who insisted that there was only one way of interpreting the buildings of the past (and I am talking not just about the ogres of Modernist architectural history in their mostly American schools but also their armour-plated predecessors from the swivel-eyed hysterics and tyrants of the ecclesiological movement onwards) are being displaced by calmer, more generous and more thoughtful people who are also better teachers. That is not because we have all become post-modernists who want to deny basic truths; it is because the old dragons were dictators and bullies who had lived on too far into an age of pluralism. There is more than one way of appreciating and ranking the monuments of western culture. There are ways of writing about building that conflict with one another but are nevertheless all valid; and likewise there are appreciations and descriptions that change over place and time. And in a sense the common theme of all of these developments is that of movement, of things changing as you move along them, in every possible sense.