When the culture has great times (whatever “great” means in this relation), then science and arts follow and get great times too, often when culture already starts having less great times.
The age of Pericles, The Renaissance, The Enlightenment, The Romantic Rebellion all flourish with new ideas and new art. They are paradigm shifts what we see with new light. I agree. I actually did a large work that puts together the idea of the time with the art of the time and how they communicate together. It’s rather beautiful if you think about it. Still, the ancient Greeks are unsurpassed I believe. There ability to strive toward universal, relational qualities about mankind are beautiful. In tragedy, in philosophy, in poetry, and in architecture. It’s the utter integration of the thought, the known, the felt, and the seen. The balance of the affective, the cognitive, and the moral.
Actually or cosmologically, it is the beginning of summer (alraedy), but culturally or historically, it is the beginning of autumn (fall). So the laying of the foundation stone of the French "Arc de Triomphe“ in 1806 was already part of the declining era, which can also be called the "era of the bourgeois clothing“.
By the way: I call this late period, which is also the latest phase of our whole cultural cycle: “Globalism” or - with reference to Spengler - “Caesarism”.
The deconstructivists deduced the slogan „form follows fantasy“ from Louis Sullivan’s slogan „form follows function“.
A deconstructivist architect is not somebody who dismantles buildings, but somebody who localizes inherent “problems” to the buildings. The deconstructivist architect treats the pure forms of the architectural tradition like a “psychiatrist” his “patients” – he ascertains the “symptoms of a suppressed impurity”, as Philip Johnson und Mark Wigley wrote in 1988 (cf. “Deconstructivist Architecture”, p. 11). It is just the same old megalomaniac architecture.
Megalomania is typical for the human species, although this merely means that some humans are megalomaniac and some not. Now we are living in a very especially megalomaniac period, yes, and I think that this phase will show us even more megalomaniac humans in the future.
The world was way more megalomaniac in the past than it is now and more so the further back in history that one goes
It might seem worse now simply because we are living through it but it is nothing at all compared to what came before