The most sophisticated architects, who work at ground level creating parts of real cities, engaging with conditions, remain cult figures. Meanwhile, the global stars – of whom Koolhaas is of course one – create their masterpieces across the skylines of the world. It is the superstars who are emulated and the international corporate practices – who digest and dilute the work of the sometimes prickly “starchitects”, making something similar, but cheaper and friendlier, for developers, councillors and contractors – homogenise the world into a bland non-place, a simulacrum of Singapore.

There was a moment, sometime in the 1970s, when it seemed like there might be an alternative. The idea of a “critical regionalism” represented an attempt by a few architects and academics to escape from the low point of global corporate banality and to introduce an idea of local building tradition, materials and typologies. This was not, it needs to be stressed, an outpost of the parallel strand of postmodernism with its tacked-on historical references and attempts at humour; it was, rather, a refined idea of a modernism adapted to its locality.

Those figures who were put forward as its proponents (although they didn’t always necessarily see themselves in that way) Juhani Pallasmaa, Álvaro Siza, Eduardo Souto de Moura, Carlo Scarpa and others, have remained widely admired. Yet the idea never quite took off. These were all brilliant architects building their own versions of modernism, mostly in small to medium-scaled buildings in cities they knew intimately or had lived in most of their lives; buildings that could afford to be rooted in a particular tradition of craftsmanship.

Throughout all of this there has been the curious pretence that modernism is not a style but somehow the default architectural language of our age – as if it was inevitable. It is, in fact, merely easier than other styles: easier to design and to build. The architectural and construction industry has talked itself into and geared itself up for a way of producing buildings that looks as if it’s the most functional solution to a problem.

In fact, as Koolhaas has shown, the exterior (ie architecture) has become completely detached from the interior, from what goes on inside, through technology and through sheer scale. In a way, architecture is over. All that is left are the handful of boutique projects that serve to assure us there is still some rationale behind all those years of education and all those centuries of culture. Architecture has absorbed modernity and modernity has chewed it up and spat it out. Modernity, not modernism, has won.