ISSUE 125 – OLD AND NEW

Overview

This issue of DOMES is concerned with the authority of the past and the daring of change in architecture, some years after the (re-) establishment of modernism (as a style) and the waning of post-modernism (only as a style, also). More specifically, it seeks to provide stimuli for the rationalisation of the influence of authority and encouragement to a display of daring, in a branch which, at least, at first sight, is self-defining, but is also acknowledged to be radical.

The architecture of the past - more distant and recent - is recognised either as a vehicle of values, albeit nostalgically, in which case it is conserved, or as a field for the practice of ecology, albeit expensive ecology, in which case it is recycled. Elimination and replacement is no longer the self-evident line of action, even in the case of impaired buildings. In order to protect values, principles of conservation and intervention in ‘scheduled’ buildings of every kind have been repeatedly determined and re-formulated. That is to say, a very general framework of guidelines has been described - and not a single (in any event, summary) catalogue of options as regards forms (on every scale of reference, from the typology of the whole to the detail of construction, style, and any decoration) during their design and realisation, and therefore the materials and the ways of construction.

Please find the complete text in the print edition.