Like all large heterogeneous groups, architects split themselves up into different factions. On each side of one of the most familiar divisions, members call themselves ‘modern’ or ‘traditional’.

This split goes back to the pioneers of modernism. Le Corbusier declared, ‘There is no longer any question of custom, nor of tradition.’ By the late 1940s, adherents of the variously-named new movement just called themselves ‘modern’. Jürgen Habermas, the philosopher of modernity, wrote, ‘Modernity revolts against the normalizing functions of tradition.’ And today the idea persists that tradition is the antithesis of what Habermas called ‘The Modern Project’. The sociologist Mike Featherstone records how ‘the modern becomes a praise-word and the not-modern becomes reduced to the blame-word tradition.’

As modernism became the established position of the vast majority of the architectural profession over a century, the idea that it might in some way be traditional has emerged. Renzo Piano could describe his work as, ‘a mature and totally new balance between … the future and tradition,’ or John Allan’s book on Berthold Lubetkin, could be subtitled ‘Architecture and the Tradition of Progress.’ The dilemma is, however, clear. Tradition had to be qualified with approved words such as ‘future’ or ‘progress’.

Claiming to be traditional while maintaining a position that is definitively anti-traditional is a problem. To have a tradition of being radical is possible but a tradition that fights the very idea of tradition sits somewhere between an oxymoron and recognition of a battle perpetually lost. The mere fact that there is an ideology that can trace a clear line of ancestry for a hundred years and has physical expression with recognisable features, does suggest that there is something traditional about modernism today. As the concept of tradition lies at the heart of this dilemma, it would be useful to understand it better.

Tradition has been given a bad name in the arts. It is often misrepresented as just history. But history is history and will always remain so and traditions happen today. They are also described as an attempt to restore the past. Restoring the past is not only impossible but the desire to do so would be a modern idea, traditions do nonetheless have a strong relationship with the past. There may be an attempt to copy something directly – to make a facsimile such as Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion – but generally they do not or simply cannot do so.

Traditions can change and evolve. Charles Dickens’ Christmas is not ours but there is a recognisable continuity between them. What matters is that the activities or the representations have an ancestry that has clearly been handed down and that this is understandable to those that take part.

As traditions are defined as something handed down from generation to generation, the question must be: how many generations does it take to make a transmitted practice into a tradition? The accepted sequence is three generations though this is not necessarily birth-to-procreation generations but can be of a community or practice. So in a school it might be three five-year academic generations but defining generations in architecture is a bit more difficult. Possibly the time of education to the start of practice – say eight to 10 years – or the time from education to teaching – say 10 to 15 years.