{"id":48354,"date":"2022-11-07T01:00:04","date_gmt":"2022-11-07T06:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=48354"},"modified":"2023-06-14T10:44:05","modified_gmt":"2023-06-14T14:44:05","slug":"qotd-the-rise-of-architectural-modernism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2022\/11\/07\/qotd-the-rise-of-architectural-modernism\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The rise of architectural modernism"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:left; padding: 0px 15px 10px 0px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-48672\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png 400w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-50x50.png 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a><em>Making Dystopia<\/em> is not just a <em>cri de coeur<\/em>, 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 <em>hoi polloi<\/em> \u2014 among whom is included Prince Charles \u2014 and established its dominance by a mixture of \u00adbureaucratic 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: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>Many ingenious lovely things are gone<br \/>\nThat seemed sheer miracle to the multitude.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Professor Curl&#8217;s book is \u00adparticularly 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,<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>was pitifully full of such faults as proportions that were vulgarly aggressive, mountebank \u00adeccentricities in detail, and windows built lying down on their sides. &#8230; 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. <\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Pevsner (to whom, \u00adincidentally, 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 \u2014 unable to speak for himself or protest after his death \u2014 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&#8217;s historiography made a bed of Procrustes seem positively made to measure. <\/p>\n<p>Theodore Dalrymple, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.firstthings.com\/article\/2019\/06\/crimes-in-concrete\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Crimes in Concrete&#8221;, <em>First Things<\/em><\/a>, 2019-06.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 \u2014 among whom is included [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[356,32,62,7,41],"tags":[86,140,1515,1289],"class_list":["post-48354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","category-books","category-europe","category-history","category-quotations","tag-criticism","tag-design","tag-modernism","tag-theodoredalrymple"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-czU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48354"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48354\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77729,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48354\/revisions\/77729"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}