Architecture provides shelter and facilitates many different human activities. It also expresses cultural values and it is as champions of traditional values that classical architects returned to the international arena in the late 1970s and 1980s, Although classicism had never entirely disappeared from the architectural scene, it had clearly receded in importance after World War II until it was little more than a residual element in contemporary design culture. Slowly, classicism began to attract new adherents.

Young architects took out the old texts on classical composition and began to relearn the principles of proportion, the orders, and traditional tectonics. Koolhaas referred to Leon Krier and “his half” of a generation, he was acknowledging the existence of a design orientation dramatically different from the one highlighted by the Museum of Modern Art’s review of contemporary developments in its Deconstructivist architecture exhibition. Koolhaas, however, was too generous in his description of the new classicists as representing half of his generation. The actual number of committed classicists constituted only a small minority of the generation coming to professional maturity in the last quarter of the century. Numbers, however, are not the critical issue since emerging movements initially represent, by definition, a minority within the dominant professional culture.

Classicists were, of course, not the only ones to point out the manifest failures of modernism; modern architecture was being assailed from many different quarters during the 1970s and 1980s. The Neo-Rationalist critique of modernist urbanism outlined by Aldo Rossi in his The Architecture of the City, for example, stimulated interest in traditional typologies which, in turn, led at least some young architects to investigate the enduring heritage of classical design. But neither Rossi nor post- modernists such as Charles Moore ever embraced classical models as literally as the new generation of classicists, represented here by the European polemicist Leon Krier and the American architect and educator Thomas Gordon Smith.