Living and false traditions

The word ’tradition’ carries so much baggage — nostalgia, kitsch, reaction, pastiche — that using it at all requires rolling all the way back to first principles and stating plainly what a true, living tradition actually is, as opposed to a false one that merely looks old. None of what follows is specific to architecture. It applies equally to cooking, to craft, to anything that gets made by hand and handed down, and it could just as easily be pinned to the wall of a maker-space as used to explain why this project produces buildings that look the way they do.

1. In a living tradition, we are allowed to copy what works and what meets human needs.
2. A copy is only a ‘fake’ when it is fraud — passing off one thing as something else.
3. In a living tradition, copying isn’t duplication: we are obliged to remix, to fit, to adapt and to improve.
4. In a living tradition, we share knowledge in common, and pass on what we have learned.
5. In a living tradition, we are delighted to be copied, but we like to be acknowledged.
6. A false tradition has none of these things, though it may seem to be old.
7. A false tradition is a marketing device concocted to have the illusion of antiquity.
8. A false tradition is usually camouflage for the indefensible.

This is also the answer to the standard ‘it’s just pastiche!’ objection levelled at any building that dares to look traditional. That critique falls flat the moment you look at what’s actually being built everywhere else: endless bad copies of modernist buildings from a hundred years ago, repeated without remix, without adaptation, without credit to the postwar originals they’re duplicating. Judged against the eight points above, that’s the closer fit for a false tradition — a style copied by rote long after the reasoning behind it has been forgotten — while a living tradition, one that’s still being fitted, adapted and improved to the situation at hand, doesn’t stop being alive just because it’s old. Classicism is what a living tradition of that kind actually looks like worked out in practical, physical detail.

© 2026 Bruno Postle (mail: bruno at postle dot net). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Last updated 15 September 2026.