Adapt and Survive

摘要

We all like our architectural moments. Those times when we look at a new building and go: that wasn't what I expected, at all. That's... different. These moments, in recent years, have come all too seldom. There has been a distinct lack of manifesto-led, dogma-driven, table-overturning or just stop-in-your-tracks original architecture. Perhaps we are sated. With even the maverick likes of postmodernist FAT now accepted as mainstream, with Will Alsop strangely quiet, with OMA making the preposterous routine, with Central Asian regimes buying into Zaha/Schumacher paramet-ricism, Malaysian developers building dRMM in Battersea, and the Stirling Prize won by a restored castle - what's next, sensation-seekers? I've pondered many possibilities recently but there is one development I really did not see coming: the revival of Art Deco at Tate Britain.