Ethnogenesis shocks and disturbs with new cultural forms, until it reaches maturity, and becomes the accepted standard forever after

Before moving on to the review of Brutalism's place in the history of definitive American architecture, I'm going to take a detour through European history in order to address a major issue about new styles being shocking, abandoning their roots, etc.

By the time America is flourishing, the European architectural expression of ethnogenesis had already run its course, reaching its last stage with Art Nouveau (whatever it was called in various countries) in the early 20th C. This was an attempt to reinvigorate their culture with a bold new modern approach, but it still fell back into styles pioneered in the Early Modern period, when these nations were truly beginning to construct new collective identities. The lightness of mass, thin wispy lines, curvilinear, employing natural motifs (vegetable, human, and animal), elaborately ornamented, playful and romantic -- none of that would have been out of place in Rococo.

That's not to denigrate the style on an aesthetic level, just to establish that it was not revolutionary, as it was back in the late Medieval and Early Modern period, as European empires began defining themselves as post-Frankish politically, and therefore post-Romanesque architecturally. No more huge hulking slabs of mass, no more clean exteriors with simple lines, no more imposing windowless fortress facades, no more dark intimate cave-like interiors, no more haphazard grouping of differently shaped volumes, no more sober and quietly reflective mood, where the energy was potential rather than kinetic, no more restraint on the libido.

The first of these developments -- Gothic -- came from the ascendant French Empire in the late 12th C., just as it was concluding its integrative civil war -- the conquest of western and southern France by the northeast, pitting the House of Capet in Paris (especially under Philip Augustus) against the House of Anjou / Plantagenet in the west. Although the French Empire was founded circa 1000 by Hugh Capet, in its early stages it was still culturally very Frankish, and held onto the Romanesque style of architecture of that earlier empire.

That was just like the Romans still borrowing heavily from Greek architecture until the end of the 1st century BC, after their integrative civil war, when they revolutionized their new style through the use of concrete, arches, vaults, and domes, amphitheaters, triumphal arches, and so on and so forth.

Or in the same way that architecture in America before the late 1800s (wrapping up our Civil War & Reconstruction period) was still mostly a local copy of styles from the British and French empires (including the vogue in those Euro empires for Neoclassical and Roman styles).

Or in the same way that early Ottoman architecture (1300s and early 1400s) still resembles Seljuk styles, where they had come from before invading Anatolia. Their integrative civil war lasted for the first half of the 15th C., and pitted the Ottomans proper, centered in the northwest of Anatolia, against the elites of other Turkic principalities (beyliks) in the south and east. Only after that civil war was concluded did they revolutionize an entirely new style for themselves. They began borrowing (not copying) from Byzantine styles, rather than recreate Seljuk styles, just as Americans began borrowing (not copying) New World influences, rather than recreate the styles of our Euro imperial ancestors or peers, after our Civil War & Reconstruction were over.

This serves as a reminder that intense bouts of ethnogenesis, accompanying the rise of new empires, always lead to radically new cultures, and the shedding of past identities. They have been forged into a new people, by having to combat their meta-ethnic nemesis, lying on the other side of a meta-ethnic frontier. This banding together for self-defense, and then expansion in their own right, makes them feel like they're no longer who they used to be. Then it's only a matter of which We will define the new identity, and that is determined in the integrative civil war -- the side closest to the original meta-ethnic frontier, not those safely removed from it.

These radically new styles always strike a certain share of the population as disturbing, shocking, too much too fast, betrayal of their roots and traditions, and so on and so forth. From the kaleidoscope of light stimulation created by stained-glass windows, to the orgiastic chorus of polyphony in church chanting, to the thin wispy flying buttresses set off by harsh diagonals, the new French identity expressed by the Gothic zeitgeist was anything but a familiar comforting evolution of traditional styles.

But once the process had been going for long enough, it became second nature, taken for granted that the people of France were no longer Frankish, that Gothic -- not Romanesque -- was their defining style, and that they wouldn't have it any other way. So some trads were shocked early on -- big deal. As the French empire starts to cohere, its people wouldn't even regard those earlier trads as truly French anyway, but as people LARP-ing as Franks (or Romans, or Gauls, or whoever else), even as the earlier polity and culture was being thoroughly replaced by that of Capetian France.

This is not a futuristic, progressivist, airy-fairy speculative concept, to embrace a new identity just cuz it's wild and new. It is to acknowledge the cold hard material reality that We are no longer Franks, who were defined by their meta-ethnic nemesis of the Roman Empire, whereas We French have been defined by our meta-ethnic nemesis of the Vikings (and later the English). We are fundamentally defined by our relations with others, and the French of circa 1000 had no historical or current contact with the Roman Empire, but they did with the Vikings.

Likewise, Americans had no historical or current antagonism with the French, as the British did way back when their ethnogenesis began. We were shaped by relations with the Indians (and later the Mexicans). That intense and enduring exposure to a new meta-ethnic Other changed who We were, and the natural outcome is a new culture to express this new reality.

If it's shocking at first, it's shocking at first. Over time future generations will come to accept it as the standard, taken for granted. And contra the feverish delusions of libtards and conservatards, this process is not a never-ending ratchet that repeatedly replaces the old with the new and becomes accepted as a new standard.

Rather, the initial revolution becomes fossilized and canonized, hardening into place, unable to be altered afterward, similar to the brain development of an individual as they grow up. A person imprints on what is going on during a sensitive developmental window, and then that's it for the rest of their days. The sensitive window for an entire culture is the aftermath of its integrative civil war.

The inhabitants of Italy during the Renaissance still recognized the culture of their 1st and 2nd-century ancestors as the Roman standard, not whatever was created during and after the Crisis of the Third Century. Likewise we still recognize Block Symphony as our architectural standard, not the glass & steel fishbowl flexspace that the iconoclasts have tried to replace it with for 40 years now -- nor any other attempt at Euro LARP-ing (since the Silicon Valley style is just a variation on Bauhaus).

At any rate, the growing pains phase of our cultural development is over -- we went through metamorphosis during the early 20th C. We are now a mature culture that cannot be artificially sent back through puberty in order to imprint on a different environment while still plastic, and develop into something else in a would-be second adulthood. There is only one adulthood, and we've already gotten there.

Americans are who we changed into during our 20th-century heyday, whether you like it or not. At this point, further development is marginal or non-existent, so rather than innovation, we move into a period of conservation and canonization, which has been under way for several decades now.