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Forum > Is This Modern? Any Style? Does it Matter?

I've started wondering whether architectural styles should start being named after the architect/designer, rather than attempting to be pigeon-holed into the relatively & seemingly narrow styles out there.

May 23, 2012 | Unregistered CommenterAndrew L. Ogas

Looks like classic CFA Voisey!

May 23, 2012 | Unregistered CommenterJohn Knight

Voysey perhaps deserves to have a style named after him, though he had both peers and close vernacular approximations. But there was only one Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
Only one Hill House, for that matter.

May 23, 2012 | Unregistered Commentermackarch

Mackintosh's Hill House, of course. Voysey and Lethaby were similar but bound to a different undergirding vernacular tradition. Call the Mackintosh "Strathclydian Freestyle?" It is lush, sexy, and tapped the Glaswegian taste for the exotic previously exemplified by his forerunner Alexander "Greek" Thomson. It is rooted in history and in place. It has about it a flavor of Romantic Nationalism that spoke to Germanic and Nordic artists, and simultaneously tickled the Aesthetic fancy as did the Englishmen Godwin and Voysey. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the self-abnegating envy early Modernist architects felt for the artifacts of industrialism.

May 23, 2012 | Unregistered CommenterMark Wright

You can call it whatever "style" you like, but Mackintosh's style is relevant only if you are working in or around Glasgow. The lesson learned from his work is that he was trying to create contemporary architecture that respected and responded to the culture of the place where the building was located.

June 13, 2012 | Unregistered CommenterTom Emerson