Throughout much of the twentieth century, histories of modern architecture generally followed the lead of the practitioners of the 1920s, who tended to stress the conceptual “divide” separating the architectural thought of the late nineteenth century from that of the early-twentieth century. The basis for positing such a divide was the belief that “modern” architecture, in particular the so called functional architecture that came into vogue in the 1920s, was the inevitable terminus of Western architectural development, at least as far as its formal language. Early practitioners of modernism were nearly unanimous in stressing their “break” with the past and in rejecting the possibility of returning to historical or stylistic themes in design. The chasm separating the “then” and the “now” was deemed to be unbridgeable.

Architectural theorists in the 1970s and 1980s took a very different view of the matter. Some argued that “history” needed to be reintroduced into design to counter the “loss of meaning” or the inherent limitations of earlier functionalism. They claimed the modern vocabulary of nonhistorical forms had exhausted its artistic possibilities and in the process it had become both tedious and inhuman. The essential “postmodern” idea was to replace this presumed monovalency of form and function with a layered polyvalency of meanings, which in turn would enrich and reinvigorate form.

Historiographic models and teleological expectations also radically changed before and during these two decades.