New architectural concepts do not emerge independent of past associations, as the founders of the Modern Movement believed or liked to pretend, as some form of direct expression of that time. Nor are they independent of the language through which our experience as individuals and members of a shared culture is mediated. On the contrary, new ideas come into being by virtue of our being able to see the new in terms of the old, and it is our unique human language which makes the generation of such ideas possible at all, and which carries the history of such ideas in its forms.