The basic principles of Modernism are still terrifically important. I encouraged Mark Jones, the director of the V&A, to invite Gordon Brown (Britain's finance minister) to see the show. He is going through a period of enthusiasm for design at the moment and I think he would see quite clearly how Modernism can be a social solution. For instance, the Corbusian idea of the tower-block has been badly executed in this country, but I believe the majority of tower-blocks could work very well if a certain amount of money was spent and if maintenance and security were improved. People would be happy to live in them and a major housing issue would be resolved.
I would also encourage every art and design student in the country to come and see the show. It might convert them from the rather floppy decorator approach much in evidence at the moment. You can't open a design magazine without seeing chandeliers everywhere, and in my opinion we're lurching back into everything that Modernism tried to change.
The fact that they filmed the interiors of buildings such as the Villa Savoye in the exhibition so that people could feel as if they were actually walking around inside, was absolutely brilliant. It shows just how much satisfaction you can get from a Modernist space.
Against -- Robert Adam, architect
Modernism was a very important movement in its day, and it saw some fine things being produced by talented people. However, now is the time to put it into its history box and lock it up for good.
Modernism was founded on a frighteningly arrogant idea that an elite group of people could remake society into something supposedly better, regardless of what the general public actually wanted. It was labelled `true architecture' by people who believed they had found the gates to heaven. Two other theories shared a similar mentality in the 1930s: fascism and Stalinism. Paradoxically, Modernism is still around today and in fact it completely dominates the architectural profession. So much so that if you meet an architect, you expect him to be a Modernist.
Everyone struggles with the definition of Modernism. It can be seen as a style but I believe it is more than that: an historical theory, based on the idea that only the things that are different in each period are important. So in the engineering era of the 1920s and 1930s, everything had to conform to what was new in engineering, otherwise you weren't being modern. It's like saying that because we have the ability to produce blobby things with computers today, that's all we can do.
In architecture courses now, if you do traditional work they fail you or recommend you go into conservation. It's like a cult and if an architect is to be recommended or chosen through a competition, you will invariably end up with a Modernist building. Purchasing choice doesn't exist and there's a general belief that offices are by nature Modernist, because that's all you can get. Back in East Germany, people thought the same thing about the Trabant.
Housing, by contrast, is almost all traditional. These buildings are not good, but that's because architecture has abandoned them. The fact that they are bad doesn't mean that people don't want them, or that Modernism is therefore right: it just means that people are not getting a good version of what they really want. Using tower-blocks for mass housing, as we did in the 1950s and 1960s, is a big mistake. They may be suitable for luxury flats or offices, but to say we got it wrong that time, so let's try again, is utter madness.
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