Description:
How has the impetus to standardise diverged and interacted with the impulse to customise over time? Architect and architectural historian Martin Bressani, who is Professor and Director at the School of Architecture at McGill University in Montreal, describes how until the late Medieval period the fabric of Western towns remained highly customised. This was a situation that was only overturned with the consolidation of absolute monarchy and the desire to create ceremonial backdrops, which demonstrated ‘classical regularity’ on a grand scale. The path towards standardisation and Modernism, though, remained in no way linear; Modernism being at least in part a response to the monumental, but overtly bourgeois ornamental forms of Baron Hausmann's Second Empire Paris.