lean towards outright nostalgia

Does the highlighted sentence mean "Whilst this set of reconstruction rules was not modern, its defenders said what was important was its critical aspect, that is its application of contemporary interpretations"?

Context:

Wall. The prime ‘no-man’s land’ on which it was constructed was snapped up and distributed by developers and major global corporations respectively, before even the city authorities could step in and properly assert the building principles of ‘critical reconstruction’, as they were to insist upon elsewhere in the city.
As I have explained elsewhere, what critical reconstruction enshrined in essence was ‘a conforming to certain conditions of building in the centre of the city based on historical ground plans: height limits, street patterns and building “lines”, fixed proportions of residential provision, and maintenance of the “character” of an urban building. Whilst its retrospective pre-modernity appeared to lean towards outright nostalgia, the point according to its defenders was that it should be critical, implying the application of a contemporary interpretation. It was, moreover, viewed by the city authorities as an important controlling device in the rampant property speculation promised by the collapse of the Wall