The following is an extract from issue 95’s Soapbox by Sandra Kaji-O’Grady, ‘A wound to the head for undead Modernism’.

“On the other hand, the outpouring of new modes of architecture and design emanating from the universities as well as practice, urgently needs critical attention. I do not think we – and I am equally culpable here – have developed the critical language to respond adequately to the architecture and design of our own time. The critical language of professional journals that review designs and buildings, for example, continues with terms that the historian Adrian Forty in Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (2000) has demonstrated are specific to Modernism and reflect its values. Terms that we consider neutral, such as form, structure, character, context, function, space, flexibility and transparency, Forty demonstrates are not only specific to Modernism and essential to its development, but value laden. To commend and aspire to form, for example, is to exclude the ‘formless’: that whose boundaries are indeterminate and whose internal order is indiscernible.

Debates around critical terms such as ‘form’ have been intense in the visual arts and have yielded new critical vocabularies, but meta-critical discussions remain fringe and academic in architecture.  We have yet to develop a repertoire of critical terms adequate to our age and the work we are compelled to judge, either as critics, jurors, users or fellow designers.”

Sandra Kaji-O’Grady is Professor of Architecture at the University of Sydney, and she is recognised for her research into the transfer of ideas from other disciplines and industries to architecture.

Kaji-O’Grady talks Modernism, which nearly a century on, is hardly ‘modern’ any more. Although times and technology have changed, architecture still clings to a style and philosophy built for another era. If we need a new ‘vocabulary’, then what exactly would this be? Post a comment below or email us.