"Cities are no longer filling with vaulting, flowing, gooey, non-orthogonal buildings engineered through advanced computing power."

"Architecture has been hit by a new sobriety. Tradition, apparently, is back.The reaction against ultramodern architecture arrived slowly at first, but accelerated with the financial crash of 2008, as the world economy and many political systems became increasingly unsteady. Amid this apparent chaos, the stability of neoclassical architecture was advocated from the very top. In 2020, the United States president Donald Trump signed an executive order advocating 'classical' architecture, including 'beautiful' traditional styles such as Greek Revival, Gothic, Georgian and neoclassical. This followed the British Conservative government appointing the late philosopher Roger Scruton to head a 2018 commission ensuring that new housing would be 'built beautiful,' which Scruton made clear meant 'traditional.' Even earlier, in 2014, the Chinese president Xi Jinping issued an edict demanding an end to 'weird architecture' in China.... And in the European Union, particularly Germany and Poland, projects of historical reconstruction – the kind that, in a previous decade, might have involved ultramodern non-orthogonal CGI-optimised arts centres – now feature new traditional-style buildings with gables and pitched roofs, set along winding lanes...."

Writes Owen Hatherley, in "The new architecture wars/Traditionalist and modernist architecture are both mass-produced, industrial and international. Is there an alternative?" (Aeon).