As an architect I try to be guided not by habit but by a
conscious sense of the past-by precedent, thoughtfully
considered. The historical comparisons chosen are part of a
continuous tradition relevant to my concerns. When Eliot
writes about tradition, his comments are equally relevant to
architecture, notwithstanding the more obvious changes in
architectural methods due to technological innovations. "In
English writing," Eliot says, "we seldom speak of tradition.
. . . Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in
a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely approbative,
with the implication, as to a work approved, of some
pleasing archeological reconstruction. . . . Yet if the only
form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following
the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind
or timid adherence to its successes, 'tradition' should be
positively discouraged. . . . Tradition is a matter of much
wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it
you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first
place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable
to anyone who would continue to be a poet
beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves
perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but
of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write
not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a
feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe . . . has
a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.
This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as
well as of the temporal and of the timeless and temporal
together, is what makes a writer traditional, and it is at the
same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of
his place in time, of his own contemporaneity. . . . No
poet, no artist of any kind, has his complete meaning
alone." I agree with Eliot and reject the obsession of
Modern architects who, to quote Aldo van Eyck, "have been
harping continually on what is different in our time to such
an extent that they have lost touch with what is not different,
with what is essentially the same.