Style Don't Last, Experience Does
Why do architectural styles change so much while a building can last for centuries?
The answer is simple: Style don’t last but architecture (experience of spaces) does.
This question posts itself a contradiction: When you say buildings last for centuries but style don’t, don’t these buildings have particular styles?
This leads to the question: What determines an architectural style?
A book? A treatise? A paper? A publication? A talk? The internet?
And what is an architectural style?
The second answer to this question: What has been the most curious aspect of a building does not equal value and the duration that the aspect of the building will last.
In this case, style is one of the most talk-about topics in architecture but it is actually being abused and used in the wrong way.
If you can simply get out of the boundary of your current everyday perception, whether it is the internet, experience, or your social environment into broader perspectives in reality, you soon realized that the buildings in the world is built upon way too many different styles that the creator do not even recognize by the name of it himself.
Who has the say of which style a building has that the others don’t?
The creator or the perceiver?
Eventually, this argument becomes worthless.
In general, a style emerges when there is a new paradigm, a new way of living that has a new requirement of experiencing space.
Style can, therefore, be a branch of knowledge used to recognize the way of buildings for studies, improvement of the later building designs and not the other way round by identifying what style is trendy and then derive building design based on it.
The third answer to the question: Style is just irrelevant, and they can change regardless of anything that you want to associate with it.
And lastly, my takeaway: Focus on the experience of buildings, not style.