"I'm often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That's impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more"
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“Old-fashioned modernist” lands like a self-issued passport: Thom Mayne claiming lineage while refusing the nostalgia that usually comes with it. The phrase is a neat contradiction, and that’s the point. Mayne is signaling that he still believes in modernism’s seriousness - the rigor, the appetite for invention, the moral urgency - but not in its most romantic sales pitch.
When he calls it “absurd” that architecture could “heal the world,” he’s not just dunking on utopianism. He’s critiquing a 20th-century habit of mistaking formal clarity for social cure: the idea that better plans produce better people, that the right grid or housing block could undo inequality, trauma, politics. Mayne’s blunt “That’s impossible” reads like an ethical boundary. It’s a refusal to let architecture pretend it has the powers of governance, medicine, or collective will - a discipline checking its own mythology.
The real sting is in the last sentence. “Today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more” isn’t triumph; it’s an obituary for ambition. It nods to a contemporary landscape where development logic, risk management, value engineering, and branding have replaced ideology as the default client. Mayne, a Pritzker-winning architect associated with aggressive, complex forms, is speaking from inside that machine. The subtext: the profession didn’t just lose its utopian illusions; it also lost the cultural permission to imagine big.
So the quote works as a double move: insist on modernism’s intensity, reject its messianic posture, mourn the era when architects were allowed to be dangerous dreamers.
When he calls it “absurd” that architecture could “heal the world,” he’s not just dunking on utopianism. He’s critiquing a 20th-century habit of mistaking formal clarity for social cure: the idea that better plans produce better people, that the right grid or housing block could undo inequality, trauma, politics. Mayne’s blunt “That’s impossible” reads like an ethical boundary. It’s a refusal to let architecture pretend it has the powers of governance, medicine, or collective will - a discipline checking its own mythology.
The real sting is in the last sentence. “Today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more” isn’t triumph; it’s an obituary for ambition. It nods to a contemporary landscape where development logic, risk management, value engineering, and branding have replaced ideology as the default client. Mayne, a Pritzker-winning architect associated with aggressive, complex forms, is speaking from inside that machine. The subtext: the profession didn’t just lose its utopian illusions; it also lost the cultural permission to imagine big.
So the quote works as a double move: insist on modernism’s intensity, reject its messianic posture, mourn the era when architects were allowed to be dangerous dreamers.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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