Quotulatiousness

September 27, 2024

So much “modern art” ages like milk

Filed under: Britain, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Most of Andrew Doyle’s latest column is behind the paywall, but I found myself nodding along to the first portion about the descent of modern art:

The works on display at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) have been curated with care. On my recent visit I began on the fifth floor, where you can admire art from the 1880s until the 1940s. On the fourth floor you will find works from the 1950s to the 1970s, and then two floors below are the collections from the 1980s until the present day. I wonder whether this arrangement is deliberate; the literal descent of the visitor from one floor to the next reflecting the figurative descent of artistic quality through the century.

And so while on the upper floor you can admire the melting clocks of Salvador Dalí’s most famous and haunting work, The Persistence of Memory (1931), and René Magritte’s The Lovers (1928), a curious meditation on romanticised desire, by the time you reach the second floor there are some cuddly toys glued together into clumps which are dangling from the ceiling. I didn’t bother to check who was responsible for this nonsense.

I have often tried to defend some of the more intriguing efforts at modern conceptual art, but I also recognise that we must be able to admit when art is simply bad. I felt the same when I saw the most recent sculpture to grace the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. It is a piece by Mexican artist Teresa Margolles entitled Mil Veces un Instante. It consists of over seven-hundred death masks of trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming people arranged into a cuboid. The faces are meant to represent those who have been the victims of violence, including the artist’s friend Karla who was murdered in Juárez in December 2015.

I don’t doubt the sincerity of the passion behind the project, or how the tragedy of this death informed the vision of the piece, but as a work of art it is banal. Like many conceptual pieces inspired by voguish identity politics, it is propagandistic and uninspiring. The Pink News has claimed that those who dislike the piece are “bigots”. I would say they simply have good taste.

I suppose it is an improvement on Heather Phillipson’s godawful “The End”, a sculpture of a dollop of whipped cream with a cherry, a drone and a fly on the top which was finally taken down from the fourth plinth in 2022. I doubt that anyone except the artist and her close family members were disappointed to see it gone. While I understand the subjectivity of such matters, surely we should be aspiring to higher standards when it comes to art in public spaces?

September 22, 2024

QotD: The work of Le Corbusier

Filed under: Architecture, Books, France, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

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 15, 2023

QotD: Modernism into Post-Modernism

Filed under: History, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The beasts of modernism have mutated into the beasts of postmodernism — relativism into nihilism, amorality into immorality, irrationality into insanity, sexual deviancy into polymorphous perversity. And since then, generations of intelligent students under the guidance of their enlightened professors have looked into the abyss, have contemplated those beasts, and have said, “How interesting, how exciting.”

Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Looking into the Abyss, 1994.

November 7, 2022

QotD: The rise of architectural modernism

Filed under: Architecture, Books, Europe, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Making Dystopia is not just a cri de coeur, however. It is a detailed account of the origins, rise, effect, and hegemony of architectural modernism and its successors, and of how architecture became (to a large extent) a hermetic cult that seals itself off from the criticism of hoi polloi — among whom is included Prince Charles — and established its dominance by a mixture of ­bureaucratic intrigue, intellectual terrorism, and appeal to raw political and financial interest. If success is measured by power and hold over a profession rather than by intrinsic worth, then the modernist movement in architecture has been an almost unparalleled success. Only relatively recently has resistance begun to form, and often all too late:

    Many ingenious lovely things are gone
    That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude.

Professor Curl’s book is ­particularly strong on the historiographical lies peddled by the apologists for modernism, and on the intellectual weakness of the arguments for the necessity of modernism. For example, architectural historians and theoreticians such as Sigfried Giedion, Arthur Korn, and Nikolaus Pevsner claimed to see in modernism the logical continuation of the European architectural tradition, and Pevsner even recruited such figures as William Morris and C.F.A. Voysey as progenitors of the movement. Pevsner was so enamored of Gropius and the Modernists that he wanted to claim a noble descent for them, as humble but ambitious people were once inclined to find a distant aristocratic forebear. Yet Voysey could hardly have been more hostile to the movement that co-opted him. The Modern Movement, he said,

    was pitifully full of such faults as proportions that were vulgarly aggressive, mountebank ­eccentricities in detail, and windows built lying down on their sides. … This was false originality, the true originality having been for all time the spiritual something given to the development of traditional forms by the individual artist.

Pevsner (to whom, ­incidentally, Curl pays tribute for his past generosity to young scholars, including himself), with all the academic and moral prestige and authority that attached to his name, was able to incorporate Voysey — unable to speak for himself or protest after his death — into the direct ancestry of modernism, even though the merest glance at his work, or at that of William Morris, should have been sufficient to warn anyone that Pevsner’s historiography made a bed of Procrustes seem positively made to measure.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Crimes in Concrete”, First Things, 2019-06.

October 22, 2022

Two new works on British architecture through the years

Filed under: Architecture, Books, Britain, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, James Stevens Curl discusses two recent books on the “monuments and monstrosities” of British architecture:

The most startling achievement of the Victorian period was Britain’s urbanisation. By the 1850s the numbers living in rural parts were fractionally down on those in urban areas. By the end of Victoria’s reign more than 75 per cent of the population were town-dwellers, and a romantic nostalgic longing for a lost rural paradise was fostered by those who denigrated urbanisation. This myth of a lost rural ideal led to phenomena such as garden cities and suburbia. Anti-urbanists and critics of the era detested the one thing that gave the Victorian city its great qualities: they were frightened of and hated the Sublime.

These two books deal with the urban landscape in different ways. Tyack provides a chronological narrative of the history of some British towns and cities spread over two millennia from Roman times to the present day, so his is a very ambitious work. Most towns of modern Britain already existed in some form by 1300, he rightly states, though a few were abandoned, such as Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester) in Hampshire, a haunted place of great and poignant beauty with impressive remains still visible. Most Roman towns were more successful, surviving and developing through the centuries, none more so than London. Tyack describes several in broad, perhaps too broad, terms.

He outlines the creation of dignified civic buildings from the 1830s onwards, reflecting the evolution of local government as power shifted to the growing professional, manufacturing and middle classes: fine town halls, art galleries, museums, libraries, concert halls, educational buildings and the like proliferated, many of supreme architectural importance. Yet the civic public realm has been under almost continuous attack from central government and the often corrupt forces of privatisation for the last half century.

Tyack is far too lenient when considering the unholy alliances between legalised theft masquerading as “comprehensive redevelopment”, local and national government, architects, planners and large construction firms with plentiful supplies of bulging brown envelopes. Perfectly decent buildings, which could have been rehabilitated and updated, were torn down, and whole communities were forcibly uprooted in what was the greatest assault in history on the urban fabric of Britain and the obliteration of the nation’s history and culture.

One of the worst professional crimes ever inflicted on humanity was the application of utopian modernism to the public housing-stock of Britain from the 1950s onwards: this dehumanised communities, spoiled landscapes and ruined lives, yet the architectural establishment remained in total denial. In 1968–72 the Hulme district of Manchester was flattened to make way for a modernist dystopia created by a team of devotees of Corbusianity.

The huge quarter-mile long six-storey deck-access “Crescents” were shabbily named after architects of the Georgian, Regency and early-Victorian periods (Adam, Barry, Kent and Nash). This monstrous, hubristic imposition rapidly became one of the most notoriously dysfunctional housing estates in Europe, a spectacular failure whose problems were all-too-apparent from the very beginning. Yet in The Buildings of England 1969, Manchester was praised for “doing more perhaps than any other city in England … in the field of council housing”. The “Crescents” were recognised quickly as unparalleled disasters and hated by the unfortunates forced to live there. They were demolished in the 1990s, but the creators of that hell were never punished.

April 26, 2022

A new guide to classical architecture

Filed under: Architecture, Books — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Ptolemy Dean reviews The Layman’s Guide to Classical Architecture by Quinlan Terry:

Trained in the bleakly grey era of the late 1950’s, the classical architect Quinlan Terry has achieved a remarkable legacy. At the time he embarked on his architectural career, the profession was locked firmly in the postwar austerity of flat-roofed perfunctory modernism, with planar walls of exposed aggregate concrete or unadorned “stretcher bond” brickwork.

This was the “machine age” of mass production of buildings, and it is sometimes hard to remember how restrictive this period must once have been, as so much has happened since. To the more hard-line practitioners of those times, any suggestion of creating buildings with ornament was considered at best eccentric but more often offensive and worthy of censure.

This beautifully produced red-cloth-covered hardback book is therefore a fitting record of a lifetime’s work of studying, drawing and creating new classical buildings. Such buildings are generally defined by the application of the five classical orders of columns handed down to us by the ancient Greeks and Romans. They are beautifully illustrated and explained in this book. There have been centuries of creative re-use of these Classical orders. Italian Renaissance, Palladians, Georgians, Victorians and Edwardians across the world have all offered ever inventive, fresh, new and distinctive reinterpretations of the Classical architectural language.

But, with the arrival of the International Modern Movement, the literal application of classical architecture was dramatically reduced and it was no longer taught in mainstream schools of architecture. For almost a century, Classicism has been seen as largely irrelevant in new building design. This book sets out to explain, in layman’s terms, what each part of the classical assembly is called and how the components can be developed and composed into a harmonious building.

Quinlan Terry’s classical buildings, which are illustrated in elegantly drawn elevations and crisp black and white photographs, illustrate that the selection and interpretation of the language of classicism is a highly personalised choice. Quinlan’s first employer, from 1962, had been Raymond Erith, to whom this book is dedicated. Erith was a gentle practitioner based in rural Essex who weathered the worst of the postwar austerity until his death in 1973.

After that time, and in part due to Erith and Terry’s joint achievement, the climate for making traditionalist buildings steadily improved, and the occasional country house commissions multiplied and expanded into full scale classical country houses on a substantial scale both here and in the United States.

December 4, 2021

QotD: Still making dystopia

Filed under: Architecture, Books, Education, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It is now three years since James Stevens Curl’s Making Dystopia was first published. Professor Curl’s book revised the history of architecture in the 20th century, exposing the standard curriculum taught to students as a poorly-conceived fabrication. The truth, backed by the mountains of evidence he cited, was frightening.

Curl’s critique of the theory and practice of modernism demolished the economical-ethical-political arguments put forward for decades that justified forcing people to live in inhuman environments. It was all a power-play, to drive humane architecture and its practitioners into the ground so that a new group of not very competent architects and academics could take over.

Alas, after three years, the situation is much the same as it was before 2018. Whoever practised humane architecture continues to do so today. Practitioners who have always applied Curl’s philosophy include Classical and Traditional architects, and followers of Christopher Alexander (who do not necessarily use a Classical style, but reject the modernist design straightjacket so as to create a more living structure). Those who produced image-based inhumane architecture have not changed tack or been influenced in any perceivable way.

Curl’s book covers human-scale developments that were allowed at the margins of the profession during several decades, as long as they didn’t threaten the core where the spotlight shines. Practitioners the world over, most often working in isolation, produce excellent and humane buildings. That work is hardly ever seen in the media, certainly never in the architecture journals. I’m sure that those architects now feel vindicated. It is possible that Curl’s book provides a rallying point for those who desire a new, humane architecture.

Nikos A. Salingaros, “Still making dystopia”, The Critic, 2021-08-30.

February 24, 2021

An antidote to the poison of modern architecture?

Filed under: Architecture, Books, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, James Stevens Curl reviews a new work by Mark Alan Hewitt that he calls “a welcome breath of sound common sense in a field where expensive insanity seems to have ruled the roost for far too long”:

Draw in Order to See: A Cognitive History of Architectural Design
by Mark Alan Hewitt

That architecture and architectural education are in a terrible state is obvious to anybody in the field. The reasons for this catastrophe are many, but some of the primary causes have been the universal embrace of the cult of inhumane modernism devoid of ornament (“a crime”), beauty, or even fun; the arrogant ditching of history and disregard of architectural precedents; the devaluation of craftsmanship through the adoption of factory-made components; and the desensitisation of architectural students terrorised and bullied into acceptance of nonsense by means of design “juries”, and by the compulsory study of false “grand narratives” of modernism that are patently distorted.

One of the worst of those pernicious texts was Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius (1936), the title of which should have been enough to put off anyone who knew anything about art history. The creation of an entirely spurious connection between Arts-and-Crafts practitioners like Morris and modernists like Gropius was part of a campaign to create respectable father-figures for disreputable modernism; to legitimise the unspeakable by giving it a fabricated historical pedigree.

It says a lot about the flabbiness of the architectural world that it so readily accepted not only Pevsner’s sacred cowdom, but his enthusiastic endorsement of the Modern Movement in architecture as the “new style” of the twentieth century; a “genuine style as opposed to a passing fashion”, and one, moreover, that was, as Pevsner approvingly noted, “totalitarian”, a remark that did not even arouse a frisson of anxiety among the dimwits. Elizabeth Cumming and Wendy Kaplan put it neatly in their The Arts and Crafts Movement (1991 & 2002): they observed that few “now accept the view of Nikolaus Pevsner, put forward in his influential Pioneers … of Arts and Crafts as an antecedent of modernism”. Unfortunately, that is not true of “schools of architecture” in which falsehoods are still taught, and people like C.F.A. Voysey, who hated the modernists and everything they stood for, was held by Pevsner, in the teeth of objections by Voysey himself, to have been such a “pioneer”, a libel still perpetrated to this day in recent publications.

The widespread acceptance of untruths, obvious errors, and false attributions can only be explained if some cognitive functions have been shut down. To swallow the sort of twaddle peddled by Pevsner one would need to disengage what one actually sees from one’s understanding: in other words, instead of looking at something with care and forming sensible judgements based on careful comparisons and observations, one has one’s vision impaired by peering through Bauhaus-tinted spectacles, and therefore sees what Pevsner & Co. want one to see. In other words, whole generations have been brought up, not to see with their eyes, but to look with their ears.

Hewitt’s intelligent new book argues persuasively for the advantages of drawing in helping us to see. So often, the camera and the mobile phone are used to record something, but it is true (and I speak from many years of experience), that one can really only understand a building or an artefact by drawing it.

December 12, 2020

QotD: Modernism

Filed under: Architecture, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Don’t you think the whole effort of modernism — in architecture, in literature, in music, in painting — might have been a huge dead end, from which Western culture will painfully have to extricate itself?

Myron Magnet, “Free Speech in Peril: Trigger warning: may offend the illiberal or intolerant”, City Journal, 2015-04.

January 23, 2020

QotD: The “great” modern architects

Filed under: Architecture, Books, Europe, Germany, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The widely accepted narrative of modernism à la Gropius is that it was some kind of logical or ineluctable development from the Arts and Crafts movement. This seems to me utterly fantastic: it is like saying that Mickey Spillane is a logical or ineluctable outgrowth of Montesquieu. It is true that in the work of certain artists, for example Mondrian, one can see a gradual change which might be considered logical, starting from figurative landscapes and ending, via ever greater abstraction, to purely geometric shapes. But even where there is such a development, it is ultimately beside the point: it does not prove that what came later was better. Each artistic product has to be assessed aesthetically on its own merits (which in architecture includes its harmony with an existing townscape), and only someone who sees with an ideology rather than with eyes could conclude anything other than that modernism has been overwhelmingly a disaster.

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

Filed under: Architecture, Books, Europe, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

What accounts for the survival of this cold current of architecture that has done so much to disenchant the urban world — the original modernism having been succeeded by different styles, but all of them just as lizard-eyed? According to Curl, the profession of architecture has become a cult. It is worth quoting him in ­extenso:

    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.

June 15, 2019

QotD: The early Bauhaus

Filed under: Architecture, Germany, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The ideas of the modernists were generally expressed in the imperative mood and were frequently of a pseudo-mystical nature. Professor Curl’s description of some of the practices prevalent in the early Bauhaus make for hilarity; cranks are always a source of fun. In the early days, the modernists of the Bauhaus tended to a form of health mysticism involving vegetarianism, garlic paste, and regular enemas. Far more important, however, was their early and inherent attraction to totalitarianism. As the author points out, Gropius and Miës van der Rohe had no objection to Nazism other than that the ­Nazis failed to commission work from them. Gropius was an opportunistic anti-Semitic snob who espoused communism until it was no longer convenient for his career. Miës sucked up to the Nazis as much as he was able. The fact that both of them emigrated from Germany has done much to obscure their accommodation with the Nazis and even allowed the modernists to pose as anti-Nazi — though the most important proponent of modernism in America, Philip Johnson, had for some years been a rank Nazi in more than merely nominal terms. Moreover, as Professor Curl points out, the Nazi aesthetic, like the communist, had much in common with modernism.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Crimes in Concrete”, First Things, 2019-06.

May 15, 2019

Modern architecture as a generations-long art crime spree

Filed under: Architecture, Britain, Europe, France, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Theodore Dalrymple is clearly quite a fan of Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism by James Stevens Curl, as this is at least the third review of the book I’ve seen by him (and you can probably tell I agree with much of his viewpoint that I’m blogging it yet again…)

In a recent debate in Prospect magazine on the question of whether modern architecture has ruined British towns and cities, Professor James Stevens Curl, one of Britain’s most ­distinguished architectural historians, wrote as his opening salvo:

    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.

This is so self-evidently true that I find it hard to understand how anyone could deny it, but modern architects and hangers-on such as architectural journalists do deny it, like war criminals who, for ­obvious reasons, continue to deny their crimes in the face of overwhelming evidence.

This is true not only of Britain but of many, perhaps most, other countries that have or had any towns or cities to ruin. Anyone who rides into the center of Paris from Charles de Gaulle Airport, for example, will be appalled at the modernist visual hell that scours his eyes as he goes.

Nor is this visual hell the consequence of the need to build cheaply. Where money is no object, contemporary architects, like the sleep of reason in Goya’s etching, bring forth monsters. The Tour Montparnasse (said to be the most hated building in Paris), the Centre Pompidou, the Opéra Bastille, the Musée du quai Branly, the new Philharmonie, do not owe their preternatural ugliness to lack of funds, but rather to the incapacity, one might say the ferocious unwillingness, of architects to build anything beautiful, and to their determination to leave their mark on the city as a dog leaves its mark on a tree.

Professor Curl’s magnum opus is both scholarly and polemical. He has been observing the onward march of modernism and its effects for sixty years and is justifiably outraged by it. British architects have managed to reverse the terms of the anarchist Bakunin’s dictum that the urge to destroy is also a creative urge: Their urge to create is also a destructive urge. I could give many concrete examples (no pun intended).

Philharmonie at the Parc de la Villette, Paris.
Photo by Zairon via Wikimedia Commons.

Curl knows that he is arguing not against an aesthetic, but against an ironclad ideology. The architectural Leninists have been determined so to indoctrinate the public that they hope and expect a generation will grow up knowing nothing but modernism, and therefore will be unable to judge it. (All judgment is comparative, as Doctor Johnson said.) In Paris recently, I saw an advertisement on the Métro (a few days before the fire in Notre-Dame) to the effect that Paris would not be Paris without the Centre Pompidou — which, of course, has a good claim to be the ugliest building in the world. In the face of such an advertisement promoted by the cultural elite, what ordinary person would dare demur?

Centre Georges-Pompidou (no, this isn’t an under construction image … it’s from 2017 and the construction was technically complete in 1977)
Gerd Eichmann photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Could anyone imagine a worldwide outpouring of genuine and heartfelt grief, such as that which greeted the burning of Notre-Dame de Paris, if any building of the last seventy years burnt down? Indeed, the destruction of many would be a cause almost for rejoicing. Modernist buildings will never age as Notre-Dame aged; they will merely deteriorate, and usually do deteriorate even before completion.

March 9, 2019

QotD: “Scientific” urban planning versus messy, unscientific, evolved town growth

Filed under: Architecture, Environment, Government, History, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Natural organically-evolved cities tend to be densely-packed mixtures of dark alleys, tiny shops, and overcrowded streets. Modern scientific rationalists came up with a better idea: an evenly-spaced rectangular grid of identical giant Brutalist apartment buildings separated by wide boulevards, with everything separated into carefully-zoned districts. Yet for some reason, whenever these new rational cities were built, people hated them and did everything they could to move out into more organic suburbs. And again, for some reason the urban planners got promoted, became famous, and spread their destructive techniques around the world.

Ye olde organically-evolved peasant villages tended to be complicated confusions of everybody trying to raise fifty different crops at the same time on awkwardly shaped cramped parcels of land. Modern scientific rationalists came up with a better idea: giant collective mechanized farms growing purpose-bred high-yield crops and arranged in (say it with me) evenly-spaced rectangular grids. Yet for some reason, these giant collective farms had lower yields per acre than the old traditional methods, and wherever they arose famine and mass starvation followed. And again, for some reason governments continued to push the more “modern” methods, whether it was socialist collectives in the USSR, big agricultural corporations in the US, or sprawling banana plantations in the Third World.

Traditional lifestyles of many East African natives were nomadic, involving slash-and-burn agriculture in complicated jungle terrain according to a bewildering variety of ad-hoc rules. Modern scientific rationalists in African governments (both colonial and independent) came up with a better idea – resettlment of the natives into villages, where they could have modern amenities like schools, wells, electricity, and evenly-spaced rectangular grids. Yet for some reason, these villages kept failing: their crops died, their economies collapsed, and their native inhabitants disappeared back into the jungle. And again, for some reason the African governments kept trying to bring the natives back and make them stay, even if they had to blur the lines between villages and concentration camps to make it work.

Why did all of these schemes fail? And more importantly, why were they celebrated, rewarded, and continued, even when the fact of their failure became too obvious to ignore? Scott gives a two part answer.

The first part of the story is High Modernism, an aesthetic taste masquerading as a scientific philosophy. The High Modernists claimed to be about figuring out the most efficient and high-tech way of doing things, but most of them knew little relevant math or science and were basically just LARPing being rational by placing things in evenly-spaced rectangular grids.

But the High Modernists were pawns in service of a deeper motive: the centralized state wanted the world to be “legible”, ie arranged in a way that made it easy to monitor and control. An intact forest might be more productive than an evenly-spaced rectangular grid of Norway spruce, but it was harder to legislate rules for, or assess taxes on.

The state promoted the High Modernists’ platitudes about The Greater Good as cover, in order to implement the totalitarian schemes they wanted to implement anyway. The resulting experiments were usually failures by the humanitarian goals of the Modernists, but resounding successes by the command-and-control goals of the state. And so we gradually transitioned from systems that were messy but full of fine-tuned hidden order, to ones that were barely-functional but really easy to tax.

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Seeing Like a State”, Slate Star Codex, 2017-03-16.

March 5, 2019

QotD: Modern architecture

Filed under: Architecture, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Now that I think about it, he said, spitballing for no particular reason, having a lot of art books of a certain sort is a political statement: if people suspects that your choice of subjects implies a rejection or at least a lack of interest in modernism or other cultures, they infer things.

My architecture books would be a rebuke to some, since they’re focused on particular eras and styles. I don’t have any books about other styles or cultures because I am not interested in them. At all. I know it’s a sign of a robust and well-rounded mind to be utterly fascinated by everything, but I’d rather spend the time knowing more about what I’m interested in. I mean, there’s no way I could begin to pretend I care as much about Japanese art as I do about Western art. I know it has its own complexities and meanings I don’t understand or recognize, but I simply don’t care.

Then again, my books are rebuke to my own culture, since the architecture and art they contain are better than the tiresome products of the contemporary art establishment. This remarkable article in Forbes – not recent, but recently discovered – contains some gas-inducing quotes about the function and purpose of modern architecture, and it’s basically this: the brightest minds of the profession believe it is the duty of the architect to startle, confront, unnerve, dissolve, destroy, and also whip out the willie to irrigate the fusty bourgeoisie notions like beauty and tradition.

The article discusses a piece that took modern architecture to the woodshed, where it said “look at this woodshed. It’s more humane than anything you design.” Someone wrote a defense, but had to be honest with himself:

    Yet Betsky then admitted, “All those critiques might be true.” They are irrelevant, he claims, since architecture must be about experimentation and the shock of the new. (Why this should be the case he does not say.) And sometimes designers must stretch technology to the breaking (or leaking) point: “The fact that buildings look strange to some people, and that roofs sometimes leak, is part and parcel of the research and development aspect of the design discipline.” Ever brave, he is willing to let others suffer for his art.

[…]

The ongoing project to unmoor Western Civ from its roots can only be enabled by people who believe the world has to be remade with its core memory wiped. I don’t share their hatred; why do I have to be forced to experience it, over and over again?

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2019-01-30.

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