Vidler's Challenge

Anthony Vilder on the pending revistion of the history of Modernism in architecture, from  his book Histories of the Immediate Present, quoted in an upcoming paper I reviewd by Macarena de la Vega, doctoral student in architectural history at the University of Canberra, Australia: 

"We would need to reassess disruptive moments and figures, not as curiosities or embarrassments, nor as washed-up utopias, ...but as openings into the process, rather than the appearance, of modernity."

"We would also need to seriously reevaluate the sacred cows of modernity, whose work has become, too quickly, canonical, in order to detect the internal inconsistencies, the still-open questions lurking behind their monographical facades."

"Finally, we would need to open those ideas of "modernism" so prevalent after the Second World War that were proposed in order to tidy up the erratic field of the early avant-gardes and to provide rules for being modern in the era of reconstruction."

Histories of the Immediate Present:
Inventing Architectural Modernism
The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2011, p 201