When graduate school a professor said: “Institutions need buildings, but architects want monuments “. There is the crux of the problem.
Yes. Novelty for the sake of novelty is a cancer. It affects all the visual arts. It afflicts music. And it has infected the humanities and social sciences in academia, where it is boosted by the publish or perish syndrome. In mature fields, it is difficult to impossible to find a truly new insight, and one eventually reaches limits on how many years one can spend researching in a desperate attempt to find a new source worthy of being explored. The goal should be to develop erudition and a profound appreciation for a classical canon, and to become a worthy teacher and guide. Instead, we see graduate students and young academics flocking to garbage studies to do something new and, they think, transgressive.
Sort of. But in comparison to what today's post-modernist "starchitects" are doing, the brutalism of the 1960s and 1970s seems drab and functional. Architects then may have thought that they were being daring and path-breaking, but their stuff doesn't impress at all now.