How do young architects move on from the formative influences and design methodologies of previous professional generations, especially when these have claimed a universal, ahistorical, commonsensical relevance? This paper examines the vexed question of cliché and transgression in the context of contemporary Swiss architecture.

This excerpt from the concluding chapter of "Forms of Practice" identifies and provides a thematic interpretation of the main tendencies of Swiss production at this time.

Ákos Moravánszky explains why for him ‘the traces of Mediterranean Rationalism in the new Swiss-German architecture are like the imitation stitching on the moulded plastic dashboard of a new car’. It is an influence which, despite the undeniable impact of Aldo Rossi and the Ticino School at ETH Zurich in the 1970s, remains skin-deep, sharing little with the present in terms of ideology or the interpretation of the historic past. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The paper “The Dilemma of Authenticity I: Swiss architecture between ethical intent and aesthetic object” was presented at The Complexity of the Ordinary International Conference, Copenhagen, 5-6 October 2006. A second part, “The Dilemma of Authenticity II: Phenomenological interpretations in Swiss architecture and its criticism” was subsequently presented at the Architecture and Phenomenology International Conference, Haifa, Israel, 20-24 May 2007. Both drafts are presented wherewith, with the stipulation that despite inevitable overlaps and repetitions the ethos of each paper is different. The first examines mainly the built work, whereas the second is a more critical examination of both the intellectual substrate of the built works and their criticism.

The paper “The Dilemma of Authenticity I: Swiss architecture between ethical intent and aesthetic object” was presented at The Complexity of the Ordinary International Conference, Copenhagen, 5-6 October 2006. A second part, “The Dilemma of Authenticity II: Phenomenological interpretations in Swiss architecture and its criticism” was subsequently presented at the Architecture and Phenomenology International Conference, Haifa, Israel, 20-24 May 2007. Both drafts are presented wherewith, with the stipulation that despite inevitable overlaps and repetitions the ethos of each paper is different. The first examines mainly the built work, whereas the second is a more critical examination of both the intellectual substrate of the built works and their criticism.

The English version of Ursula Prokop’s German publication from 2005 was published by the specialized publishing house that “focuses on memoir, art, architecture, design, and music, often encompassing forces behind migration and diaspora.” The background of the publishing house should be taken into consideration, as the publishing house is associated with architect Charles Paterson (born as Karl Schanzer), Adolf Loos’s nephew, and his daughter Carrie. Such a close link to the rise of European modernism guarantees knowledgeable and carefully selected outcomes. Ursula Prokop is an architectural and cultural historian, who focuses on the multicultural environment in Vienna between 1900 and 1938. Most significant publications of hers are Wien, Aufbruch zur Metropole (Vienna: The Rise of a Metropolis, 1994), Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein: Bauherrin, Intellektuelle, Mäzenin (Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein: builder, intellectual, patron, 2005, in 2010 published in English under the title Margaret Stonborough Wittgenstein) and, rather recently, Zum Judischen Erbe in Der Wiener Architektur: Der Beitrag Judischer Architektinnen Am Wiener Baugeschehen 1868‒1938 (On the Jewish legacy in Viennese architecture: The contribution of Jewish architects to the Viennese building process 1868‒1938, 2016). Ursula Prokop, nowadays the independent researcher, ranks among researchers, whose outcomes have been consistent for decades and are characterized by truly accurate and nearly exhaustive archive research. While the original book was published in German, the English edition excels in outstanding translation by Dr. Laura McGuire, assistant professor of history and theory of architecture at the School of Architecture, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa.

Historically, the Modern Movement and the International Style are part of the definition of European modernity. However, it was European modernity that took root in the mid-twentieth century in the United States through an unpredictable but successful grafting of some of its masters onto the American scene: Richard Neutra, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, at the expense of American modernists such as Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, even though it was indebted to them for a number of its fundamental spatial concepts such as the load-bearing structure, the curtain wall and the free plane. Then, towards the end of the 1960s, a radical contestation of this grafting of European modernity into the United States was undertaken by American theorists and architects, who engaged in a different refocusing than the painters of the New York School, such as Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Franck Kline, and Mark Rothko in the publication, prior to postmodernity, of the Manifesto of the Irascibles, also an anti-European American refocusing, but expressly claiming to be modern. On the contrary, postmodernity in architecture wants to make a clean sweep of modernity. The current paradox, in the postmodern context, is the American rejection of modernity, as a whole, without an inventory having been made to restore to modernity as the "stage of the future" its archaic American part, which has little to do with European modernity.