. . . the radical left corrupts all it touches, including architecture.
Roger Scruton on "The Fury of the Modernists," excerpted below.
In every art form there has been a “battle of styles,” as the old idioms became tired and repetitious, and new idioms searched for space in the creative mêlée. For the most part the battle has been good humored, with new solutions steadily gathering approval from the art-loving public.
The passage of The Rite of Spring from an act of outrageous defiance to . . .
. . . a classic of the symphony-hall repertoire is a case in point, as is the rise of T.S. Eliot from the purveyor of arcane mysteries to the unofficial poet laureate of the modern world.
Art lovers have mostly taken an open-minded attitude in this battle. They have recognized that what seems like anti-human defiance may often be a deeper form of acceptance, so that apparent ugliness might turn out to be real beauty in the long run.
There is one exception to this ecumenical approach to modern art, and that is architecture . . . . From its beginnings in the Bauhaus, architectural modernism has been less an aesthetic experiment than a moral crusade . . . .
Those who advanced the “international” style were animated as much by revulsion towards the existing fabric of our cities [Unca D: a form of revulsion against the deplorables of an earlier age] as by enthusiasm for the new materials and the large-scale projects . . . they facilitated.
They referred constantly to the benighted quality of their opponents, who were not simply competitors in the realm of style but wicked reactionaries, withholding the benefits of progress from the mass of humankind.
The modernists belonged, on the whole, to the revolutionary wing of contemporary socialism, with Hannes Meyer, as director of the Bauhaus, explicitly pledging allegiance to the Leninist vision, while others, like the endearing Karel Teige in Prague, advocating a romantic and poetic communism designed to liberate the common people without controlling them.
Le Corbusier attempted to join this revolutionary movement at a certain stage but, finding a more congenial sponsor in the Vichy Government of war-time France, he moved rightwards, without, however, losing the totalitarian mentality that united him to Gropius and Meyer.
. . . .
[The] international modernist aesthetic was . . . presented as an aesthetic innovation, and the inspiration for the new building types. People who didn’t like it—and then as now they were the majority—were held to be committing the same kind of aesthetic crime as those who banished Manet from the salons, or those who rioted at the first performance of The Rite of Spring.
[Within] thirty years the dilapidated towers [of the high-rise "slum clearance" projects built by the modernists], standing in a sea of garbage, ravaged by vandalism and criminal gangs, and with many of their residents suffering from mental health problems and living in a permanent state of anxiety, are usually blown up, and their population re-housed in the next generation of mistakes. . . .
. . . .
[There] remains in the background of the modernist movement a kind of fury, an indignant assault on all alternatives, and a readiness to accuse opponents of every kind of moral, political, and intellectual failing . . . .
. . . .
[The] fury of the modernists is no passing agitation, but part of what they are. . . . Both templates [Mr. Scruton is referring to "featureless high-rise blocks in which the working classes were to be imprisoned" and "polished aquariums" for the super-rich] are deeply hostile to what matters in human life, which is the ability to live side by side in privacy, to enjoy the benefits of family love, and to cooperate with one’s neighbors in creating a place that belongs to us all.
(Peter Scruton, "The Fury of the Modernists," The American Conservative, December 13, 2018 (abridged, lightly edited))
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