So, that is related to some extent but it also has secondary independent roots coming out of academia. And particularly, I would say since the 2008 crisis, the Occupy movement, the anti-capitalist backlash. The universities were always kind of left liberal, left oriented, and that kind of increased. And so you have this kind of woke takeover of the universities and that also affected the discipline of architecture.
And it also affected the arenas of, let's say, critical and academic discourse around architecture, things like the Venice Biennale and Chicago Architecture Biennale, other conferences more in the academic critical realm. And they have been usurped and pulled away their attention from the development which goes on still, although it has been paralyzed in major arenas of the world economy. But also in Europe and in Britain, whatever still goes on actually in the Square Mile, there's still degrees of freedom because that's the accident of history where an ancient medieval constitution prevented the kind of new politics from encroaching and stopping development there.
So the discipline pulled away from commenting on and accompanying critically what we are doing as architects with large portfolios, large projects, projects which are vital for the development of the city. The discipline pulled away from that and focused on marginal groups, social justice, maybe biodiversity, themes which are the global issues. So this frontier architecture and the big architecture, the bulk as well as the key projects leading forward, they were now bereft of any discursive control, debate, discussion. They were written off as neoliberal, as commercial, as beyond the pale.
We were no longer invited to be analysts. The schools wouldn't exhibit our work. We wouldn't be invited so much to lectures anymore, and that's not only me, there's all the well-known architects. And the schools severed off, so academia and cultural communication with architecture severed off from the professional discipline and its leaders and its major projects. And that meant that the major projects and the professional architecture, bereft of any critical discourse and arenas, becomes kind of self-indulgent to some extent, or let's say, not critically steered, reverts back to a craft. And the craft is just something which is pre-architecture.
Architecture evolved through the Renaissance where you had men of letters like Alberti, theorists with an innovative consciousness, developing architectural treatises correlating the good city design, the ideal cities of the Renaissance with the right constitution of a polis, of a city-state. They looked at the development of an architecture and an estate and the leading houses of, for instance, Venice and Florence, and discussed the functionality and social functionality and economics of such buildings and institutions in an innovative way, and that has continued since that period.
We know architecture of authors who push the best and brightest, who are well known and enter the history of architecture, will be those who innovate, and they're accompanied by treatises, by explanations. Because if you innovate, you have to go beyond tradition-bound building where you just do what has always been done, what people might expect, but you want to innovate and go forward with the times. As the times evolve, and that has been going on significantly throughout the centuries, in particular the 20th century with the reinvention of architecture, modern architecture, the international style. You have the heroes of that transformational revolution: Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe. Also writers, debaters, they were debating these projects. They had also specialist theoreticians joining that, and it wasn't separated off.
And recently it has been separated off. I mean literally in the last kind of 20 years it started to happen, and therefore I'm calling that the end of architecture as a critically discourse-led profession and discipline. And always left as some kind of profession which relies on, it's kind of cut loose from a discourse, and it becomes some kind of craft where you rely on what you've done before and it's not critically discussed. Because with clients you can't have the full discussion, because you don't open up the panel of opportunities critically of where their projects would go and how their project would fit into the larger city, and then you start having maybe to dominate. Just architects keep repeating themselves. They're not connected with research and universities like we still are. And they may be vulnerable to a client thinking he knows what he should have and want. And that is a kind of craft-like condition which is basically reverting back before we had architecture in distinction of mere building, or architecture in distinction of tradition-bound building, some kind of vernacular. And we're back into a kind of modern times vernacular, and that's the end of architecture as this kind of theoretical discipline.
