A jogger makes his way past the brand new One Santa Fe apartment building on Santa Fe Avenue in the Arts District section of Downtown Los Angeles. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

These were the words of the year in architecture: Basic. Fundamental. Primitive. Ancient.

If fashion had normcore — the flaunting of a bland, practical and Gap-like aesthetic, the plain sweatshirt as statement of principles — architecture reset itself this year in an even more fascinating (if occasionally desperate) way.In a culture and an economy being dizzyingly remade by technology, architecture chose to embrace not the future, where architects, like so many creative people, can seem superfluous, but the past. And not the recent past of the 1970s and 1980s — a bit of post-modern revivalism notwithstanding — but the long past.

Because architecture is slow, we've yet to see this impulse reveal itself in finished buildings (although there is something of the super-normal, the banal stretched to its monumental breaking point, in Michael Maltzan's One Santa Fe apartments on the eastern edge of downtown Los Angeles). But in exhibitions, temporary pavilions, little magazines and lectures, it was seemingly everywhere......Continue Reading

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