Housing, Aveiro

So, just how does one go about changing architectural taste?

Recipe #1 is to impose it. This is probably still the simplest way. And the rules of taste dictatorship are, for that purpose, well known.

Recipe #2 is via reform. This is a gentler method, but it takes ages. Although it requires stamina, it is the most effective in the long term. Reform is, on the other hand, rather difficult and boring to implement.

Recipe #3 is to educate. This is the noblest, but certainly not the most frequently used method. There are always considerable costs to this option, and so, even if it appears attractive to start with, at some point it seems to become an intolerable burden – financially, or otherwise. It requires updating, investment, hard work. Certainly, it is not appropriate for any sort of lazy culture.

After that, we seem to run out of options, but I would add a fourth recipe which entails subverting taste codes 'from within', by which I mean that through immersion one can deal with existing conditions – be they of the market, social differences or architectural/professional constraints.

In a country like Portugal, where education still lags behind for most of the population, taste – like other matters – is still in that phase in which it requires some kind of reform. And, believe it or not, such reform is now mostly driven by the mass media. Considering the obvious drawbacks of populist media, however, other social players need to take some responsibility for refining and redefining taste.

As taste affects the reception of architecture – as much as it does any other cultural production – this is also a question that has to be dealt with by architects. Immersion in popular culture – i.e., the consumer market – implies a specially sharp and critical perspective on how to deal with mainstream taste and, still within it, to ensure the evolution of architectural culture.

Let’s presuppose for a moment that mainstream taste has caught up with modernist architectural taste. Architects should then proceed to offer some evolution of their own taste culture. After all, and as we know, taste culture equals the hard core of any creative discipline. Difference, social or otherwise, is affirmed and confirmed by taste.

Beyond professional skills, technical knowledge or artistic talent, taste is the determining factor. And if mainstream taste has caught up with your specific or specialized taste – and you still want to affirm it – then you had better move on. This is as elementary as any fashion philosophy can get.

Ikea and Wallpaper defined modernist taste for a larger audience because they were there, immersed in the everyday life, demonstrating taste, making it accessible, reconstructing it for the masses. The goals of modern reformists have been fully achieved. Accordingly, it is time for architectural culture to move on from modernist taste. That is, of course, if architecture still wants – as in the early modern period – to be a major player in the processes by which tastes change.

Within this context, if, as an architect, you are today leaving the main urban centres to build the landscape of the smaller cities of a country such as Portugal, you are still bound to come up against very different taste cultures. But because Ikea has arrived, because the media need new flavours, because Wallpaper and Elle reach the more affluent clients and because architect-designed buildings have indeed become fashionable, architects are already much better off than before.

Even within this evolving scenario, though, only a few of these architects will then risk – let alone succeed in – travelling beyond the shores of politically or economically correct taste. Architect Ricardo Vieira de Melo told me he is surprised when he receives favourable reactions to his designs in what used to be hostile territory for architects. No wonder. Not only does he participate in the improvement of taste that is slowly and subversively sweeping the country, but he also manages to produce exciting, powerful and non-conformist architecture at the same time.

The rationale behind his undulating aluminium facades is both technical and aesthetic. They reduce noise pollution from a busy road. They reduce the bulk of the building. They echo and augment the dynamic movement of traffic. And last, but not least, they abandon the geometric rigidity of the modernist slab.

At the same time, however, these unusual facades are engaged in altering taste. Not only in contrast to the surrounding neighbourhood with its mix of cheapness and kitsch, but also in contrast to what architectural taste is now expected to produce in this context. And people really seem to like it.