Nicholas Higgins 02/05/2020

Modern Architecture and the End of Civilisation

A call to arms for all that is decorative, imperfect and playful in architecture

Britains top 5 favourite buildings were built prior to the 20th century, St Pauls Cathedral hitting top place. Most of us go out of our way to vacation in “historic” (read: beautiful) towns that contain as little postwar architecture as possible. But why? 

This, I would suggest, is because of man’s innate distaste for the functional. ‘Functionalism’, under its various guises, was the loadstar in the twentieth century revolution in design. Goodbye gargoyles and fluted columns, hello glass and steel. The slogan ‘form follows function’, coined in the 1880s by Louis Sullivan, and the dictum of French architect Le Corbusier, ‘a house is a machine for living in’, both state the idea uncompromisingly. Architecture today very much lives in its shadow. 

This seems like a cheerless way to make buildings. Consider how the bastard of the German Bauhaus movement in Britain, ‘Brutalism’, birthed the universally loathed concrete tower blocks of the 1960s. I wonder what genius thought ‘cruelty and savageness’, were ever good attributes for spaces to live in. Of course, this was rationalised as a fitting architecture for war torn Britain. Art could and should be ugly, because life is ugly, and the highest duty of art is to be honest about who we are rather than deluding us with comforting fables. 

Contemporary architecture has followed in these footsteps: decoration, decorative effect and ornament are shorned in favour of repetitive modular forms and flat surfaces. New builds, so lauded on BBC’s Grand Designs, bear greater resemblance to German gun emplacements than cozy retreats from the confusions of modern life. London’s 500 million ‘One Hyde Park’ dulls the eyes with its barren slabs of steel and glass. The ‘Walkie Talkie’ building billows out like a swollen middle finger raised in defiant profanity to all and sundry. The Vauxhall Tower resembles a 50 storey hypodermic needle.

These buildings are mean and grudging. ‘Less is more’, more like ‘less is a bore’, as Robert Venturi put it. Their inorganic, machine made materials, express that cold, heartless part of humanity, so often encapsulated in dystopian literature. In their glorification of functionality, they fail to account for the human thirst for the imperfect, for materials hewn by the human hand. As John Ruskin put it in The Stones of Venice; ‘to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyse vitality’. Imperfection is essential to all we know as life, ‘in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty’. Indeed, how much more appealing is the wonky thatched cottage, than the pumped up lego brick?

Buildings are no longer made to be emotionally enriching. Christopher Wren’s St Pauls Cathedral was made to be ‘handsome and noble to all ends of it and to the reputation of the City and the nation’. Its colossal dome and showpiece west facade are a masterpiece of restrained Baroque. Handcrafted by hundreds of skilled craftsmen in Portland stone, this is the kind of building that edifies and uplifts the viewer. Both spiritual and sublime, it makes a positive contribution to our thoughts and emotions. Its equivalent today, the monotonous office block and bastion to western finance, does no such service. These are but functional hives built to extract labour from the common man.

Foregoing the opportunity to put a smile on our miserable faces, modern architecture can even be perverse. In a 60s tower block you were cut off from light, nature, colour, and regular communion with other humans. No wonder then, that they become havens of crime, suicides, drug use and behavioural problems. It’ll do little to help deep seated social problems, if people are trammelled in on all sides by ugliness. It’s with good reason that architects today seek to temper their uninspiring builds with green space and community amenities. 

Good cheer in architecture is especially important, since its not like other forms of art. You can go to an art Gallery and leave. You can listen to Mozart’s requiem and switch it off. Read a book and throw it in the bin. Build environments, however are ubiquitous and inescapable. 

To the architect and their acolytes, however, any bourgeoise notion of ‘beauty’ is seen as extraneous to the ‘honest’ modern building. Why find beauty in superfluous decoration when it already exists in structural rationality? Modern builds are ‘true to materials’ and express a ‘machine like simplicity’. They scoff at the retrospective nostalgia for a building like St Pauls. 

They ignore the fact that ordinary folk like you and me, don’t understand what they’re on about, and don’t frankly care. Modern buildings don’t coddle your base human desires, ‘they tell it how it is’. Never mind the fact that your home must bear resemblance to Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward. Whilst modernist revolutionaries might catch the headlines, I don’t think it would be wrong to say that people still crave colour, pattern, decoration and ornament. 

This is why Art Deco, the last true ‘decorative’ style, is so well loved. Consider all of New York’s glorious Art Deco skyscrapers. Bold, flat geometric shapes, strong colours and stylised forms, turn otherwise montonous concrete and glass into something decorative. It’s playful, fun, exciting. This is also fantastically interesting since the decoration speaks volumes about the times in which they were built. Art Deco buildings expressed the optimism, dynamism, technological and material progress of the 1920s and 30s. Christopher Wren’s choice of ornament reflected his desire to unify Restoration England and Protestant Christianity. Future generations will look back at architecture of today and be left stupefied, who were we? Had we all been lobotomised with no way to express ourselves other than through ‘structural rationality’. 

Architecture, then, does not need to adhere to a dogmatic set of rules pertaining to composition, structure, colour and texture. Architects must cast off the manacles of modernism and embrace the visceral power of design. Even if buildings fly in the face of rationality, why not make ones that bring a smile to our faces? This is the architecture of free spirited optimism and unbridled joy.