The sheer megalomania of the modernist architects, their evangelical zeal on behalf of what turned out to be, and could have been known in advance to be, an aesthetic and moral catastrophe, is here fully described. The story is more convoluted than I, not being an historian, had appreciated; Professor Curl conducts us deftly through the thickets of influences of which I, at least, had been ignorant. But the rapid rise and complete triumph of modernism throughout the world, so that an office block in Caracas should be no different from one in Bombay or Johannesburg, is to me still mysterious, considering that its progenitors were a collection of cranks and crackpots who wrote very badly and whose ideas would have disgraced an intelligent sixth-former. I do not see how anyone could read Corbusier, for example (and I have read a fair bit of him), without conceiving an immediate and complete contempt for him as a man, thinker and writer. He has two kinds of sentence, the declamatory falsehood and the peremptory order without reasons given. How anyone could have taken his bilge seriously is by far the most important enquiry that can be made about him.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Architectural Dystopia: A Book Review”, New English Review, 2018-10-04.
September 22, 2024
QotD: The work of Le Corbusier
April 13, 2024
QotD: Architects and modern architecture
Professor Curl’s is a very painful book to read. In one sense his targets are easy for, as the photos amply demonstrate, modernist architecture and its successors are so awful that it scarcely requires any powers of judgment to perceive it. It is like seeing a TV evangelist and knowing at once that he is a crook. Yet modernist architecture, despite its patent hideousness and inhumanity, still has its defenders, especially in the purlieus of architectural schools. Moreover, the population has been browbeaten into believing that there was never any alternative, and it is obvious that to undo the damage would take decades, untold determination and vast expenditure. Removing the Tour Montparnasse alone would probably cost several billion. No one is prepared to make this colossal effort.
What Walter Godfrey wrote in 1954 is debatable:
It is not an exaggeration to say that nine men out of ten have lost all sensitiveness to an art that was once a matter of common interest.
If this is true, it is because they have learned to accept, or swallow what they are given. The epidemiology of graffiti, however, suggests to me that, at least subliminally, men still take notice of their surrounding and are affected by them: defacement is overwhelmingly of hideous Corbusian surfaces, that is to say on what Corbusier called “my friendly concrete”.
As for the architects and their acolytes, the architectural commentators, they hide behind the claim that most people do not “understand”. They claim that modernist architecture is better than it looks or functions, that it is “honest”, a weaselly word in this context. The architects cannot recognise the obvious for the same reason that Macbeth could not stop murdering once he had started:
I am in blood
Stepped in so far that should I wade no more
Returning were as tedious as to go o’reProfessor Curl has written an essential, uncompromising, learned, sometimes slightly densely, critique of one of the worst and most significant legacies of the 20th century. He offers a slight glimmer of hope in the existence of architects who, bravely, have resisted the blandishments of celebrity status and the approbation of their corrupted peers. His book has a wonderful bibliography, the fruit of a lifetime of reading and reflection, that will give me occupation for a long time to come. It is a loud and salutary clarion call to resist further architectural fascism.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Architectural Dystopia: A Book Review”, New English Review, 2018-10-04.
February 15, 2020
QotD: Architecture’s lingering racism
In the 1920s, during the time he was a member of the French Fascist party, the seminal architect Le Corbusier said he was disgusted by the “zone of odours, [a] terrible and suffocating zone comparable to a field of gypsies crammed in their caravans amidst disorder and improvisation.” He also chimed in with Loos: “Decoration is of a sensorial and elementary order, as is color, and is suited to simple races, peasants, and savages … The peasant loves ornament and decorates his walls.”
More recently, indicative of architecture’s current race problem, in 2006 the aforementioned highly influential dean of Tulane’s architecture school, Reed Kroloff, wrote the embarrassingly tone-deaf, flat-footed essay “Black Like Me.” (As I discuss below, he collaborated with Betsky on a post-Katrina project.) Kroloff — the privileged, self-described gay white Jew from Waco, Texas — announced that he was now black, that the Hurricane Katrina disaster had made him feel first-hand the African-American predicament. His piece was subject to much ridicule. No wonder the Mods have chosen to insulate themselves from the un(brain)washed masses. Architecture has become a gated community.
Betsky, to his credit, doesn’t pretend that architects should even try to make outreach. Showing little sympathy for democracy, he says that appeals to the public are “mystical.” The people — the 99% — do not deserve a seat at the table. Yet Betsky would have us believe that he and the architecture he supports are “progressive.”
Justin Shubow, “Architecture Continues To Implode: More Insiders Admit The Profession Is Failing”, Forbes, 2015-01-06.
January 23, 2020
QotD: The “great” modern architects
Moreover, claiming respectable ancestors is somewhat at variance with equal claims to be starting from zero (as Gropius put it), but such a contradiction is hardly noticed by the grand narrative history of modernism that Professor Curl attacks and destroys.
He is not unable or unwilling to praise where it is due, though it is due rarely enough; and he is particularly effective in tracing the opportunistic ideological divagations of the modernists, whose one constant predilection was for absolute power over others. Mies, for example, was attracted to socialist totalitarianism, and his only objection to Nazism was that the Nazis eventually rejected his desire to have everything built according to his prescriptions. He left Nazi Germany because he feared his previous pro-leftism made him permanently suspect in its eyes, not because he was appalled by its brutality. If only they’d let him build! But contrary to apologists for Mies, and to a legend constantly repeated, it was not the Nazis who closed the Bauhaus but Mies himself, and he left Germany only four years after their assumption of power.
Finding refuge in America, Mies quickly perceived that the power of patronage of megalomaniac building lay with giant corporations rather than with fascists or communists and persuaded many of them to build his preternaturally inhuman and uninspired monstrosities. By a strange quirk of history, and because of mankind’s perpetual propensity to make logical errors, Mies was able to pose dishonestly as anti-totalitarian and even as a friend of freedom precisely because he had fled Nazi Germany where they hadn’t patronised him. He was fortunate that soon afterwards the United States had another totalitarian enemy, the Soviet Union. Mies and his allies were thus able to claim that his totalitarian modernism was actually a manifestation of western freedom. There are many such ironies pointed up in this book that would be delicious had they not had such appalling consequences.
Corbusier was a fascist in the most literal sense of the word, and early during the Occupation advocated the removal by force of the majority of Paris’ population because it had no business to be living there. Can one wonder that a man with thoughts like that built monstrosities?
Theodore Dalrymple, “Architectural Dystopia: A Book Review”, New English Review, 2018-10-04.
January 7, 2020
QotD: The cult of Le Corbusier
A dangerous cult may be defined as a kind of false religion, adoption of a system of belief based on mere assertions with no factual foundations, or as excessive, almost idolatrous, admiration for a person, persons, an idea, or even a fad. The adulation accorded to Le Corbusier, accorded almost the status of a deity in architectural circles, is just one example. It has certain characteristics which may be summarized as follows: it is destructive; it isolates its believers; it claims superior knowledge and morality; it demands subservience, conformity, and obedience; it is adept at brainwashing; it imposes its own assertions as dogma, and will not countenance any dissent; it is self-referential; and it invents its own arcane language, incomprehensible to outsiders.
Anyone who thinks this is an exaggeration has not read much Le Corbusier. (His writing is as bad as his architecture, and bears out precisely what Curl says.) Nor is it difficult to find in the architectural press examples of cultish writing that is impenetrable and arcane, devoid of denotation but with plenty of connotation. Here, for example, is Owen Hatherley, writing about an exhibition of Le Corbusier’s work at London’s Barbican Centre (itself a fine example of architectural barbarism). According to Hatherley, Le Corbusier was:
the architect who transformed buildings for communal life from mere filing cabinets into structures of raw, practically sexual physicality, then forced these bulging, anthropomorphic forms into rigid, disciplined grids. This might be the work of the “Swiss psychotic” at his fiercest, but the exhibition’s setting, the Barbican — with its bristly concrete columns and bullhorn profiles, its walkways and units — proves that even its derivatives can become places rich with perversity and intrigue, without a pissed-in lift [elevator] or a loitering youth in sight. … [T]hese collisions of collectivity and carnality have no obvious successors today.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Crimes in Concrete”, First Things, 2019-06.
January 4, 2020
QotD: “Starchitects”
One is the idea that an architect aspiring to greatness must also aspire to novelty. It is this imperative to “innovate” that underpins the diagrammatic design concepts of the Deconstuctivists. There is of course nothing wrong with innovation per se; it is the knee-jerk compulsion to innovate, or “reinterpret” — as a kind of moral imperative — that is the mid-20th-century aesthetic legacy. To be fair to the profession, I would come to the defense of much innovative public and commercial architecture, most of it by architects that the public has never heard of. Tragically though, these unpretentious and unsung essays in steel, glass, and masonry have been eclipsed in the public imagination by the “starchitect” bling that is currently turning the centers of our great cities into a collection of (in James Stevens Curl’s memorable phrase) “California-style roadside attractions”.
The other cancer is the idea that building design has sociological, psychological, and macro-economic dimensions that the architect — simply by virtue of being an architect — is competent to judge. What really matters to your average architecture student is drawing — which is fine, and just as it should be, until the vain idea emerges that their drawings represent some kind of implicit vision for mankind. At my school, any student’s design presentation had to include a verbal rationale — often post hoc and invariably half-baked — of how the form, massing, and materials of the design are expressive of such imponderables as the supposed psychological “needs” and “aspirations” of the users and the wider “community” that the building is to serve. The students were simply reciting the bogus language of their tutors — in which buildings might be said to be “fun,” “thought provoking,” “democratic,” “inclusive” and other such nonsense.
Graham Cunningham, “Why Architectural Elites Love Ugly Buildings”, The American Conservative, 2019-11-01.
January 3, 2020
QotD: Against The Grain
Against The Grain should be read as a prequel to Scott’s most famous work, Seeing Like A State. SLaS argued that much of what we think of as “progress” towards a more orderly world – like Prussian scientific forestry, or planned cities with wide streets – didn’t make anyone better off or grow the economy. It was “progress” only from a state’s-eye perspective of wanting everything to be legible to top-down control and taxation. He particularly criticizes the High Modernists, Le Corbusier-style architects who replaced flourishing organic cities with grandiose but sterile rectangular grids.
Against the Grain extends the analysis from the 19th century all the way back to the dawn of civilization. If, as Samuel Johnson claimed, “The Devil was the first Whig”, Against the Grain argues that wheat was the first High Modernist.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Against The Grain“, Slate Star Codex, 2019-10-15.
March 13, 2019
QotD: Le Corbusier
Le Corbusier was challenged on his obsession with keeping his plan in the face of different local conditions, pre-existing structures, residents who might want a say in the matter, et cetera. Wasn’t it kind of dictatorial? He replied that:
The despot is not a man. It is the Plan. The correct, realistic, exact plan, the one that will provide your solution once the problem has been posited clearly, in its entirety, in its indispensable harmony. This plan has been drawn up well away from the frenzy in the mayor’s office or the town hall, from the cries of the electorate or the laments of society’s victims. It has been drawn up by serene and lucid minds. It has taken account of nothing but human truths. It has ignored all current regulations, all existing usages, and channels. It has not considered whether or not it could be carried out with the constitution now in force. It is a biological creation destined for human beings and capable of realization by modern techniques.
What was so great about this “biological creation” of “serene and lucid minds”? It … might have kind of maybe been evenly-spaced rectangular grids:
People will say: “That’s easily said! But all your intersections are right angles. What about the infinite variations that constitute the reality of our cities?” But that’s precisely the point: I eliminate all these things. Otherwise we shall never get anywhere.
I can already hear the storms of protest and the sarcastic gibes: “Imbecile, madman, idiot, braggart, lunatic, etc.” Thank you very much, but it makes no difference: my starting point is still the same: I insist on right-angled intersections. The intersections shown here are all perfect.
Scott uses Le Corbusier as the epitome of five High Modernist principles.
First, there can be no compromise with the existing infrastructure. It was designed by superstitious people who didn’t have architecture degrees, or at the very least got their architecture degrees in the past and so were insufficiently Modern. The more completely it is bulldozed to make way for the Glorious Future, the better.
Second, human needs can be abstracted and calculated. A human needs X amount of food. A human needs X amount of water. A human needs X amount of light, and prefers to travel at X speed, and wants to live within X miles of the workplace. These needs are easily calculable by experiment, and a good city is the one built to satisfy these needs and ignore any competing frivolities.
Third, the solution is the solution. It is universal. The rational design for Moscow is the same as the rational design for Paris is the same as the rational design for Chandigarh, India. As a corollary, all of these cities ought to look exactly the same. It is maybe permissible to adjust for obstacles like mountains or lakes. But only if you are on too short a budget to follow the rationally correct solution of leveling the mountain and draining the lake to make your city truly optimal.
Fourth, all of the relevant rules should be explicitly determined by technocrats, then followed to the letter by their subordinates. Following these rules is better than trying to use your intuition, in the same way that using the laws of physics to calculate the heat from burning something is better than just trying to guess, or following an evidence-based clinical algorithm is better than just prescribing whatever you feel like.
Fifth, there is nothing whatsoever to be gained or learned from the people involved (e.g., the city’s future citizens). You are a rational modern scientist with an architecture degree who has already calculated out the precise value for all relevant urban parameters. They are yokels who probably cannot even spell the word architecture, let alone usefully contribute to it. They probably make all of their decisions based on superstition or tradition or something, and their input should be ignored For Their Own Good.
And lest I be unfair to Le Corbusier, a lot of his scientific rational principles made a lot of sense. Have wide roads so that there’s enough room for traffic and all the buildings get a lot of light. Use rectangular grids to make cities easier to navigate. Avoid frivolous decoration so that everything is efficient and affordable to all. Use concrete because it’s the cheapest and strongest material. Keep pedestrians off the streets as much as possible so that they don’t get hit by cars. Use big apartment towers to save space, then use the open space for pretty parks and public squares. Avoid anything that looks like a local touch, because nationalism leads to war and we are all part of the same global community of humanity. It sounded pretty good, and for a few decades the entire urban planning community was convinced.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Seeing Like a State”, Slate Star Codex, 2017-03-16.
February 24, 2019
Another review of Curl’s Making Dystopia
Having read a few reviews of James Stevens Curl’s recent Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism, I’m likely to add it to my booklist (when I have a budget for new books again, that is). Here, Michael Mehaffy shares his comments on the book:
Cumbernauld Shopping Centre, voted as Britain’s most hated building in a Channel 4 poll.
Photo by Ed Webster via Wikimedia Commons.
For most reform-minded urbanists today, the complicity of architectural Modernism in the urban fiascoes of the last century is not in dispute. A representative (and seminal) criticism was Jane Jacobs’ withering 1961 attack, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in which she described Le Corbusier’s “wonderful mechanical toy” that “said everything in a flash, like a good advertisement” — but as to how a city actually works, it told “nothing but lies.” Jacobs’s work was of course a major inspiration in forming the Congress for the New Urbanism, along with the work of other reformists like Leon Krier, Christopher Alexander and Vincent Scully.
In fact, the 1996 Charter of the New Urbanism almost precisely inverts Le Corbusier’s 1933 Athens Charter: in place of the Modernists’ functional segregation, we would have mixed use; in place of their dominance of fast-moving vehicles (especially cars), we would have walkability and multi-modal streets; in place of wholesale demolition of historic districts and prohibition of historic styles, we would have preservation and renewal, and buildings that “grow from local climate, topography, history, and building practice.”
Yet in the last few decades, architectural Modernism has enjoyed a resurgence among some New Urbanists, as it has in the wider profession of architecture. For them, it’s reasonable to separate the urban mistakes of Modernism from its alleged architectural genius, which, as they see it, continues to offer inspiring building design ideas that can take their place happily within great new cities.
Of course, many critics would not agree — including many of the profession’s most prominent insiders. For them, the building-scale and urban-scale failures of Modernism have been of a piece, borne of a totalizing but defective theory of habitat, and even a dubious theory of architectural form itself. As the Post-Modernist Rem Koolhaas observed (in his 1995 book S,M,L,XL), “Modernism’s alchemistic promise, to transform quantity into quality through abstraction and repetition, has been a failure, a hoax: magic that didn’t work.” Nor was Koolhaas the first to attack the ideological foundations of Modernism. Similar criticisms came from earlier insiders like Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, wife of Bauhaus pioneer Lazslo, whose stinging 1968 essay on the Bauhaus labeled it “Hitler’s Revenge.” Its built works in the US carried, for her, “the browbeating symbolism of a negative ideology that was already bankrupt when the dying German Republic unloaded it on America.”
Yet for a movement that has been so frequently discredited, Modernism still has a curious grip on the profession even today. That’s because from the beginning, according to historian James Stevens Curl, the movement has been populated by “architectural bullies” who would stop at nothing to seize power, extinguish its competitors, re-write history, forbid all other styles (especially those with any ornament), and otherwise enforce a radical agenda — one that only seemed to offer all things alluring, progressive and historically inevitable. Beneath that marketable cover story, he says, the real agenda was an exhilarating quest for power and dominance, and especially later, for the wealth generated by a profitable industrialization of the human environment. Modernism sold, and no matter if it also sold out—cities, people, history, the future. For Curl, that approach was (and is) nothing less than “architectural barbarism.”
February 18, 2019
Modernism as “architectural PTSD”
In Architect, the Journal of the American Institute of Architects, Witold Rybczynski reviews James Stevens Curl’s Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism:
The buildings in my neighborhood, Logan Square in downtown Philadelphia, fall roughly into two categories. There are those that offer visual pleasure, whether they are modest run-of-the-mill brick row houses or the rather grand Board of Education Building, an Art Deco-ish pile topped by busts of Sir Isaac Newton, Ben Franklin, and Alexander Graham Bell. “How nice that someone actually took the trouble,” I think as I walk by. And then there is the second category: utilitarian apartment slabs with unrelieved gridded façades, infill condo housing that looks as if it had been trucked in from the suburbs, a grim precast concrete retirement home that takes up a whole block. “I wish they hadn’t built that,” is my all too common reaction. The Board of Education Building dates from 1932. That’s the approximate cut-off date. Before the 1930s, the buildings are pretty good; after that, not so much. What happened?
The answer to that question is the subject of James Stevens Curl’s controversial new book, Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism (Oxford University Press, 2018). Curl is a British architectural historian, professor emeritus at De Montfort University in Leicester, and the author of more than 40 books, including the well-regarded The Victorian Celebration of Death (most recently updated in 2004) and The Oxford Dictionary of Architecture (1999). According to Curl, what happened was “architectural barbarism,” which is how he characterizes modern architecture. He does not mince words. Describing the emergence of the International Style in the 1920s, he writes: “It became apparent that something very strange had occurred: an aberration, something alien to the history of humanity, something destructive aesthetically and spiritually, something ugly and unpleasant, something that was inhumane and abnormal, yet something that was almost universally accepted in architectural circles, like some fundamentalist quasi-religious cult that demanded total allegiance, obedience, and subservience.”[…]
Buildings like PSFS were not the result of the First World War, of course, but it was the war that opened the door to radical change — whether it was political (Nazism), economic (the New Deal), or architectural (Modernism). This, rather than Curl’s theory of a quasi-religious cult, is a more convincing explanation for the “strange rise” of modern architecture. As the title of his book suggests, the author assumes malevolence on the part of Gropius, Le Corbusier, et al., but what if the International Style was instead the result of a sort of postwar architectural PTSD?
[…]
The ultimate failure of modern architecture is not that it was incapable of producing beautiful works of individual art. There have been plenty of those, pace Professor Curl. The real drawback is that while the Modern Movement effectively suppressed an architectural language that had taken hundreds of years to evolve, it proved incapable of developing a successful substitute, the weak-kneed antics of Postmodernism notwithstanding. The strength of pre-modern architecture was that it provided a rich variety of modes of expression. It permitted complicated things to be said in complicated ways, and simpler things in simpler ways, analogous to the spoken language, which can be used to write drama and poetry or instruction booklets.
February 10, 2019
A debate on the impact of Brutalism on British cities
In Prospect magazine, James Stevens Curl and Barnabas Calder disagree on how Brutalist architecture has influenced destroyed urban areas in so many British cities. This is Curl’s opening salvo:
20 Fenchurch Street in London has been nicknamed the “Walkie-Talkie” due to its distinctive design.
Image by Toa Heftiba via Wikimedia Commons.
Visitors to these islands who have eyes to see will observe that there is hardly a town or city that has not had its streets — and skyline — wrecked by insensitive, crude, post-1945 additions which ignore established geometries, urban grain, scale, materials, and emphases.
Such structures were designed by persons indoctrinated in schools of architecture in ways that made them incapable of creating designs that did not cause immense damage and offend the eye, the sensibilities, and the spirit. Harmony with what already exists has never been a consideration for them, as it was not for their teacher: following the lead of “Le Corbusier” (as Swiss-French architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret called himself), they have, on the contrary, done everything possible to create buildings incompatible with anything that came before. It seems that the ability to destroy a townscape or a skyline was the only way they have been able to make their marks. Can anyone point to a town in Britain that has been improved aesthetically by modern buildings?
Look at the more recent damage done to the City of London, with such crass interventions as the so-called “Walkie-Talkie” (which, through its reflectivity, has caused damage on the street below), or the repellent stuff inflicted on several cities by the infamous John Poulson and some of his bent cronies (from the 1950s until they were jailed in 1974). Quod erat demonstrandum.
How has this catastrophe been allowed to happen? A series of totalitarian doctrinaires reduced the infinitely adaptable languages of real architecture to an impoverished vocabulary of monosyllabic grunts. Those individuals rejected the past so that everyone had to start from scratch, reinventing the wheel and confining their design clichés to a few banalities. Today, form follows finance, when modern architecture is dominated by so-called “stars,” and becomes more bizarre, egotistical, unsettling, and expensive, ignoring contexts and proving stratospherically remote from the aspirations and needs of ordinary humanity. Their alienating works, inducing unease, are, without exception, inherently dehumanising and visually repulsive.
February 4, 2019
QotD: Brasilia and reconciling with Jane Jacobs
Brasilia is interesting only insofar as it was an entire High Modernist planned city. In most places, the Modernists rarely got their hands on entire cities at once. They did build a number of suburbs, neighborhoods, and apartment buildings. There was, however, a disconnect. Most people did not want to buy a High Modernist house or live in a High Modernist neighborhood. Most governments did want to fund High Modernist houses and neighborhoods, because the academics influencing them said it was the modern scientific rational thing to do. So in the end, one of High Modernists’ main contributions to the United States was the projects – ie government-funded public housing for poor people who didn’t get to choose where to live.
I never really “got” Jane Jacobs. I originally interpreted her as arguing that it was great for cities to be noisy and busy and full of crowds, and that we should build neighborhoods that are confusing and hard to get through to force people to interact with each other and prevent them from being able to have privacy, and no one should be allowed to live anywhere quiet or nice. As somebody who (thanks to the public school system, etc) has had my share of being forced to interact with people, and of being placed in situations where it is deliberately difficult to have any privacy or time to myself, I figured Jane Jacobs was just a jerk.
But Scott has kind of made me come around. He rehabilitates her as someone who was responding to the very real excesses of High Modernism. She was the first person who really said “Hey, maybe people like being in cute little neighborhoods”. Her complaint wasn’t really against privacy or order per se as it was against extreme High Modernist perversions of those concepts that people empirically hated. And her background makes this all too understandable – she started out as a journalist covering poor African-Americans who lived in the projects and had some of the same complaints as Brazilians.
Her critique of Le Corbusierism was mostly what you would expect, but Scott extracts some points useful for their contrast with the Modernist points earlier:
First, existing structures are evolved organisms built by people trying to satisfy their social goals. They contain far more wisdom about people’s needs and desires than anybody could formally enumerate. Any attempt at urban planning should try to build on this encoded knowledge, not detract from it.
Second, man does not live by bread alone. People don’t want the right amount of Standardized Food Product, they want social interaction, culture, art, coziness, and a host of other things nobody will ever be able to calculate. Existing structures have already been optimized for these things, and unlesss you’re really sure you understand all of them, you should be reluctant to disturb them.
Third, solutions are local. Americans want different things than Africans or Indians. One proof of this is that New York looks different from Lagos and from Delhi. Even if you are the world’s best American city planner, you should be very concerned that you have no idea what people in Africa need, and you should be very reluctant to design an African city without extensive consultation of people who understand the local environment.
Fourth, even a very smart and well-intentioned person who is on board with points 1-3 will never be able to produce a set of rules. Most of people’s knowledge is implicit, and most rule codes are quickly replaced by informal systems of things that work which are much more effective (the classic example of this is work-to-rule strikes).
Fifth, although well-educated technocrats may understand principles which give them some advantages in their domain, they are hopeless without the on-the-ground experience of the people they are trying to serve, whose years of living in their environment and dealing with it every day have given them a deep practical knowledge which is difficult to codify.
How did Jacobs herself choose where to live? As per her Wikipedia page:
[Jacobs] took an immediate liking to Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, which did not conform to the city’s grid structure.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Seeing Like a State”, Slate Star Codex, 2017-03-16.
February 2, 2019
QotD: Le Corbusier
So the early modern period is defined by an uneasy truce between states who want to be able to count and standardize everything, and citizens who don’t want to let them. Enter High Modernism. Scott defines it as
A strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws
…which is just a bit academic-ese for me. An extensional definition might work better: standardization, Henry Ford, the factory as metaphor for the best way to run everything, conquest of nature, New Soviet Man, people with college degrees knowing better than you, wiping away the foolish irrational traditions of the past, Brave New World, everyone living in dormitories and eating exactly 2000 calories of Standardized Food Product (TM) per day, anything that is For Your Own Good, gleaming modernist skyscrapers, The X Of The Future, complaints that the unenlightened masses are resisting The X Of The Future, demands that if the unenlightened masses reject The X Of The Future they must be re-educated For Their Own Good, and (of course) evenly-spaced rectangular grids.
(maybe the best definition would be “everything G. K. Chesterton didn’t like.”)
It sort of sounds like a Young Adult Dystopia, but Scott shocked me with his research into just how strong this ideology was around the turn of the last century. Some of the greatest early 20th-century thinkers were High Modernist to the point of self-parody, the point where a Young Adult Dystopian fiction writer would start worrying they were laying it on a little too thick.
The worst of the worst was Le Corbusier, the French artist/intellectual/architect. The Soviets asked him to come up with a plan to redesign Moscow. He came up one: kick out everyone, bulldoze the entire city, and redesign it from scratch upon rational principles. For example, instead of using other people’s irrational systems of measurement, they would use a new measurement system invented by Le Corbusier himself, called Modulor, which combined the average height of a Frenchman with the Golden Ratio.
The Soviets decided to pass: the plan was too extreme and destructive of existing institutions even for Stalin. Undeterred, Le Corbusier changed the word “Moscow” on the diagram to “Paris”, then presented it to the French government (who also passed). Some aspects of his design eventually ended up as Chandigarh, India.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Seeing Like a State”, Slate Star Codex, 2017-03-16.
November 6, 2018
QotD: Architectural modernism
In this scholarly, learned but also enjoyably polemical book, Professor Curl recounts both the history and devastating effects of architectural modernism. In no field of human endeavour has the idea that history imposes a way to create been more destructive, or more importantly destructive: for while we can take avoiding action against bad art or literature, we cannot avoid the scouring of our eyes by bad architecture. It is imposed on us willy-nilly and we are impotent in the face of it. Modern capitalism, it has been said, progresses by creative destruction; modern architecture imposes itself by destructive creation.
As Professor Curl makes clear, the holy trinity of architectural modernism — Gropius, Mies and Corbusier — were human beings so flawed that between them they were an encyclopaedia of human vice. They spoke of morality and behaved like whores; they talked of the masses and were utter egotists; they claimed to be principled and were without scruple, either moral, intellectual, aesthetic or financial. Their two undoubted talents were those of self-promotion and survival, combined with an overweening thirst for power.
Their intellectual dishonesty was startling and would have been laughable had it not been more destructive than the Luftwaffe. When they claimed to have no style because their designs were imposed on them by history, technology, social necessity, functionality, economy etc., and like Luther proclaimed they could do no other (which soon became the demand that others could do no other also), they remind me of the logical positivists who claimed to have no metaphysic. But if no given style or metaphysic is beyond the choice of he who has it, to possess a style or a metaphysic is inescapable in the activity of artistic creation or thought itself. And even my handwriting has a style, albeit a bad one.
In like fashion, as this book makes beautifully clear, the modernists were adept at claiming both that their architecture was a logical development to and aesthetic successor of classical Greek architecture and utterly new and unprecedented. The latter, of course, was nearer the mark: they created buildings that, not only in theory but in actual practice, were incompatible with all that had gone before, and intentionally so. Any single one of their buildings could, and often did, lay waste a townscape, with devastating consequences. What had previously been a source of pride for inhabitants became a source of impotent despair. Corbusier’s books are littered with references to the Parthenon and other great monuments of architectural genius: but how anybody can see anything in common between the Parthenon and the Unité d’habitation (an appellation that surely by itself ought to tell us everything we need to know about Corbusier), other than that both are the product of human labour, defeats me.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Architectural Dystopia: A Book Review”, New English Review, 2018-10-04.
October 16, 2018
Modernism and the “so-called international style … is the blight of Germany (and of almost everywhere else where it has been tried)”
Theodore Dalrymple on the awful concrete-and-glass monoliths of modern architecture, especially those designs by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Gropius:
The modernism and so-called international style that is the blight of Germany (and of almost everywhere else where it has been tried, which is almost everywhere in the world), and which the author of the article appears to think is apolitical, was hardly without its intellectual, ideological, and political foundations.
And what hideous intellectual, ideological, and political foundations they were! The great figures of modernism — great, that is, in the scope and degree of their baleful influence, not great in artistic or aesthetic merit — were from the first totalitarian in spirit. They were toadies to the rich and bullies to the poor; they were communists and fascists (not in the merely metaphorical sense, either), and by a mixture of ardent self-promotion, bureaucratic scheming, and intellectual terrorism managed to gain virtual control of the world’s schools of architecture. Just try saying in a French architectural school what is perfectly obvious, that Le Corbusier was not a genius except in self-advertisement, that his fascist ideas were repugnant, that he regarded humans in his cities much as we all regard bedbugs in beds, that during the Occupation he suggested deporting millions of people from Paris because he thought they had no business to be there, that his designs were incompetent, and that his constructions were instinct with and the very embodiment of his odious ideas, and see how far you get up the academic ladder! (How, incidentally, were the world’s most beautiful cities and buildings erected without the aid of architectural schools?) Anyone interested in the ideological foundations, as well as effects, of architectural modernism should read James Stevens Curl’s recently published Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism (Oxford), a magisterial and to me unanswerable account of one of the greatest aesthetic disasters to have befallen Europe in all its history. A single modernist building in a townscape is like a dead mouse in a bowl of soup, that is to say you cannot very well ignore it however splendid its surroundings may otherwise be.
Ah, you might protest, we have moved on from Mies van der Rohe et al., and so we have. (By the way, Professor Curl is very amusing on the opportunistic evolution of Mies van der Rohe’s name, as well as his equally opportunistic passage from being pro-Nazi to purely careerist refugee from Nazism.) Nonetheless two things need to be said about this supposed moving on from modernism to postmodernism and other isms: first that the damage, reparable only by demolition on a vast and inconceivable scale, has been done, and second that change is not by itself necessarily for the better. The capacity of eminent architects to spend vast sums of money to build aesthetic monstrosities fit to make Vitruvius weep is illustrated by the Whitney Museum in New York and the Philharmonie in Paris, the latter in particular of truly astonishing hideousness, that would have been almost comical had it not absorbed and wasted so much money, in the process becoming for many generations of the future as pleasing an aesthetic experience as a foreign body in the eye.
Philharmonie at the Parc de la Villette, Paris.
Photo by Zairon via Wikimedia Commons.
The mystery is how and why the patrons, those who choose the designs, stand for it. The key, I suppose, is to be found in Hans Christian Andersen — the Emperor’s New Clothes. The patrons are afraid to be thought by the architects not to understand: an accusation that Le Corbusier leveled decades ago at all those who did not approve of his plans to destroy old cities and cover the world with an ocean of raw concrete and a forest of almost identical towers. In other words, it is intellectual and moral cowardice that makes the world go round.
