In the modernist camp, there are also alternatives on offer to the Polite Modern hegemony. The Heroic Moderns take as their starting point the pure, white-modern architecture of the 1920s and 1930s - modernism's pioneering period. Technology has caught up with the aesthetic to the extent that it no longer has to be cold, leaky or flaky. In the hands of an architect such as David Chipperfield or Rick Mather (both adept at houses, restaurants and art galleries), the genre is undergoing a renaissance. Mather, Oregon-born but British-based, has produced in Hampstead, of all conservative places, a Heroic Modern house that, at a glance, could have come off a 1930s drawing board. It fits in to an extent with the present-day fashion for minimalism, but Mather's work is rather more expressive than that, while his tendency to include patches of bright colour again bracket him with the prewar moderns. Following on from this, 1940s revivalism can be found in the work of the young architect Jonathan Ellis-Miller, who reinterprets the steel-and-glass Californian "case study" houses of that period with dedication and wit.
The New Functionalists, to be encountered on another of the forking paths of modernism today, care little for elegance or beauty - that's a by-product, if it occurs at all - but set great store by honesty and plainness. Witness the impending Walsall Art Gallery by Caruso St John - a very large and dis-tinctly austere new public building - or the National Glass Centre in Sunderland, reviewed last week, by Gollifer Associates. In a post-industrial society, it is revealing that architects are rediscovering the virtues of the industrial aesthetic - which older big-name architects such as Nicholas Grimshaw, who has always worked this way and is now busier than ever, must find amusing.
Feilden Clegg's 'office of the future' in Watford. Photograph: Dennis Gilbert
High Tech, the dominant modernist style of the 1970s and 1980s (the Pompidou Centre in Paris or the Lloyd's building in London, both by Richard Rogers) is metamorphosing. On the one hand you have Sleek-Tech, at which, on a good day, Sir Norman Foster is still the master. His new Congress Centre in Valencia with its apparently floating upturned roof, or the smooth hangar of his American Air Museum at Duxford near Cambridge, exemplify the genre perfectly: these buildings are landmark objects, not exercises in understatement. On the other hand, you have Eco-Tech, where the quest for natural cooling and ventilation - rather than energy-wasteful air-conditioning - is expressed in the architecture. Consider Feilden Clegg's "office of the future" in Watford, where the shiny solar chimneys are an inescapable part of the design. This, too, though hardly uncouth, represents a blow against architectural politeness. For a hairier example, look to the engineering faculty at De Montfort University, Leicester, where the building and its ventilation towers are dressed up, by the architects Short Ford, in highly decorative, turbocharged gothic manner. That is a transitional building: the last knockings of PoMo coming up against the beginnings of Eco-Tech.
