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The critical eye will weigh down equally on all styles, and be fair if properly utilised. The inherent difficulty in this approach is that one must step back and evaluate, not just react to a building. Sometimes when we come face to face with our initial reaction versus studied evaluation, we can still be in sync, but it can also go in reverse, all part of the process. It is the same process we learn with art, some will just depend on their first reaction and never change for the rest of their life. Others will discover and/or learn that the approach must be beyond the initial reaction to be of any real value. That latter is a byproduct of maturation, in my opinion.
I think that we have already established that preservation of good architecture, or at the very least, preservation of historically valued buildings, is a good foundation from which to vary the urban palette. Retrofitting the lost styles is far more trecherous. Ideally, we should not be in the business of force feeding a historicist style by inserting buildings that look like they belong to the past, and proclaiming that our work is done - that's nostalgia, and nostalgia seldom if ever results in a good architecture. One of the more intriguing dimensions to so-called Modernist architecture is that much of it strives to be ahistorical, stripping down to content, not decoration, the latter of which can be typed and dated in a hurry. But the result is not automatically OK because we may prefer it - that too must be evaluated.
Contextualism is often given as the reason for creating some of these historicist buildings, and it can end up in denigrating not only the work created, but also what it is meant to enhance. Aggressive, anti-contextual buildings, are an extreme from the opposite direction - sometimes it still works, often it does not.
I suppose that some will think that a step back means you lose by definition some of your passion toward the very thing that you are experiencing. On the contrary, it intensifies that passion, but at the same time it puts that passion in alignment with our brain. You often see other layers to the architectural statement, or the lack thereof. You can sometimes determine when something is following rote or is truly an inspired work. Ultimately this approach will lead to a subjective conclusion, and I will never try to portray it otherwise. But it would be a serious mistake to dismiss the value of going through with what one person here disdainfully refers to as the 'intellectual exercise'.
Architects are likely to create their work with both passion and brains, why don't we return the favour with our passion and brains, and not just one or the other.
