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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Why should we care about the architecture that surrounds us? | |
| This isn't just about feeling aesthetically pleased by what we see. | |
| Buildings broadcast a message. | |
| Good and bad architecture can lift or subdue the human spirit. | |
| The architecture we leave behind also represents the legacy of our contribution to human history. | |
| The buildings we build directly impact our quality of life and the nature of the environment that surrounds us. | |
| And that's why this matters, because aesthetic ugliness encourages ugly behaviour. | |
| Municipal pride evaporates. | |
| Your ability to create places that are meaningful and places of quality and character depends entirely on your ability to define space. | |
| With buildings. | |
| In order to inform us who we are. | |
| And when you degrade the public realm, you will automatically degrade the quality of your civic life. | |
| Oh, but there's no good or bad architecture, just like there's no good or bad art. | |
| It's all subjective. | |
| Bullshit. | |
| We were spoiled by thousands of years of brilliant architecture. | |
| All of it different in style, but impeccable in taste. | |
| Now we're increasingly surrounded by atrocities like... | |
| This. | |
| Why is modernist and postmodernist architecture so grotesque? | |
| Because after World War II, radical architects launched a revolution against earlier traditionalist styles, believing they represented colonialism, racism, slavery, and exploitation. | |
| It was the revenge of mediocrity upon talent and taste. | |
| They were the social justice warriors of their time. | |
| Aesthetic terrorists. | |
| The architectural equivalent of abstract modern artists. | |
| And just like virtually all abstract modern artists, everything they produced was relentlessly hideous. | |
| Post-war architects were also egomaniacs who were so strident about standing out from the beauty that preceded them, they rebelled by producing unremitting ugliness. | |
| The American architect Louis Sullivan expressed the credo of the modernists when he said that form follows function. | |
| In other words... | |
| Stop thinking about the way a building looks and think instead about what it does. | |
| Sullivan's doctrine has been used to justify the greatest crime against beauty that the world has yet seen, and that is the crime of modern architecture. | |
| And the result proves as clearly as can be that if you consider only utility, the things you build will soon be useless. | |
| This building is boarded up. | |
| Because nobody has a use for it. | |
| Nobody has a use for it because nobody wants to be in it. | |
| Nobody wants to be in it because the thing is so damned ugly. | |
| Everything has been vandalised. | |
| But we shouldn't blame the vandals. | |
| This place was built by vandals. | |
| And those who added the graffiti merely finished the job. | |
| But just like the art world, this rejection of the establishment has become the establishment. | |
| Prince Charles was right. | |
| "What I do not think is sensible in the long run and right is when the avant-garde becomes the establishment. | |
| And that is what has happened, I believe. | |
| Not only in architectural terms, but in many other areas as well." Not only is modernist architecture manifestly horrid, it's inherently totalitarian. | |
| Modernist guru Le Corbusier deliberately lobbied for the construction of giant brutalist residential tower blocks on the fringes of cities to atomize and segregate the workers and the lower classes from the technocratic elite. | |
| We must create a mass-production state of mind, he raved, demanding every city in the world adopt the same uniform style of bleak, Concrete totalitarianism. | |
| To produce a utopian new society which would, in a sense, be social engineering through architecture. | |
| Cities like London and Birmingham have been irreparably damaged by Le Corbusier-inspired brutalist tower blocks that attract nothing but crime and degradation. | |
| Ceausescu-style mass housing that served to desecrate both the landscape... | |
| And people's aspirations. | |
| What was rebuilt after the war has succeeded in wrecking London's skyline and obliterating the view of St Paul's in a jostling scrum of skyscrapers, all competing for attention. | |
| And look at Birmingham. | |
| Birmingham's city centre became a monstrous concrete maze that only cars could find their way through. | |
| People didn't stand a chance. | |
| Cars were placed above people. | |
| And people were placed one above the other on concrete shelves. | |
| Modernist architects had so little foresight that after a short time these tower blocks streaked with water stains and infested with moss mimicked and provoked the moral decay of their surroundings. | |
| Now the plastic cladding intended to provide a half-hearted facelift has only succeeded in turning them into death traps. | |
| The problem with Grenfell Tower... | |
| Is a very deep-seated one. | |
| It goes back to the point at which it was thought popular to put up tower blocks as an exercise in social engineering. | |
| There are opinion surveys going back to the 1940s. | |
| And when people are asked what type of property they want to live in, 80% say houses. | |
| Two or three percent say tower blocks. | |
| What, Mr. Speaker, did the politicians and the bureaucrats give to the people so that there are 4,000 of them now blighting our landscape? | |
| We gave them tower blocks, which they did not want. | |
| We must recognize that people want houses, not tower blocks, and we must build them houses and get rid of tower blocks and then allow them, as Margaret Thatcher did. | |
| In the 1950s, local authorities even wanted to demolish the Georgian city of Bath, the most architecturally beautiful city in the whole of England, and bury it. | |
| Under these, as Theodore Dalrymple notes, the British are barbarians, camped out in the relics of an older and superior civilisation, to whose beauties they are oblivious. | |
| The despairing malaise that seems to hang heavy in the UK air. | |
| Permeates from these concrete monuments to misery up and down the country. | |
| And if anyone's to blame, it's Nazi collaborator Le Corbusier. | |
| Said to be the most influential, the most admired and the most detested architect of the 20th century. | |
| He schemed to destroy entire cities to realise his fevered dream of autocratic urban planning. | |
| And he was partly successful. | |
| Everywhere you go in London, these hulking monoliths impose their repulsiveness, ruining the harmony of entire townscapes, ghettoising the environment, forcing people to live in concrete ant heaps. | |
| Queen Square in Old Trafford. | |
| This is where I grew up and it was demolished in the late 1960s, and in a way it was like having one's childhood wiped away. | |
| In Queen Square, my grandmother occupied the fourth house. | |
| We occupied the fifth house, and the sixth house was occupied by my mother's sister and her family. | |
| so it was a very strong community and it was very tight very solid and it was also quite happy well there's nothing at Queen's Square now As you can see, everything has just vanished. | |
| it's just like the whole thing has been completely erased from the face of the earth. | |
| I feel great anger, I feel massive sadness. | |
| It's like a complete loss of childhood. | |
| Now, when I pass through here, or even being here today, it's just so foreign to me. | |
| And that's quite sad, I think. | |
| And thanks to stupid and corrupt councillors, this nihilistic lust to bury Britain's architectural heritage under a massive modern detritus, Hasn't abated since. | |
| They've just swapped the piles of reinforced concrete for mountains of soulless, inhumane glass and steel. | |
| When the public began to react against the brutal concrete style of the 1960s, architects simply replaced it with a new kind of junk. | |
| Glass walls hung on steel frames with absurd details that don't match. | |
| The result is another kind of failure to fit, and is there simply to be demolished. | |
| The Shard in London. | |
| A glassy vulgarity that wouldn't look out of place in Dubai. | |
| Pretty appropriate given that Gulf Arab Money now owns half of England's capital city. | |
| Another reminder that gigantism has superseded elegance and intricacy. | |
| Another homage to nothing more than architect Renzo Piano's ego. | |
| Whose idea was it to let the designer of this eyesore deface London's already scarred skyline? | |
| Here's another of Piano's atrocities. | |
| The Whitney Museum. | |
| A modern art gallery. | |
| A 422 million abortion of a building that looks more like a secret police torture chamber than an art gallery. | |
| But hey, at least they provided diving boards for its visually traumatized inhabitants to commit suicide. | |
| Look at this grim intruder onto the otherwise majestic skyline of Paris. | |
| Tour Montparnasse. | |
| Authorities must have realized the hideous mistake when they banned buildings over seven stories tall just two years after its completion. | |
| But the damage was already done. | |
| It combines size and inescapability with banality, writes Dalrymple. | |
| I cannot see it without feeling a surge of anger. | |
| The best view of Paris is from the top of Montparnasse. | |
| Because Montparnasse can't be seen. | |
| The Kunsthaus Grasse in Austria. | |
| And of course it's a modern art museum. | |
| Looks like a malevolent alien spaceship has just landed, and its inhabitants are about to incinerate the population, War of the World style. | |
| Look at this monstrosity. | |
| The University of Engineering and Technology in Peru. | |
| Listen to how one of the architects describes it. | |
| We're interested in weight. | |
| For us, the enjoyment of architecture is the sense of weight being borne down or supported. | |
| The feeling of moving with the forces of gravity. | |
| It's a very primal need. | |
| Total nonsense. | |
| You don't look at the Taj Mahal and think of the sense of weight being borne down. | |
| That's just pretentious obscurantism. | |
| To disguise the fact that the building is ghastly. | |
| Look at this time-lapse of Birmingham. | |
| Majestic, stirring buildings heartlessly raised to make way for a library that looked more like a place to burn books than to keep them. | |
| The new library was demolished a couple of years ago, then replaced with this, which could be considered even worse. | |
| Look at the callous abomination, which is Boston City Hall. | |
| A public place so dismal that the winos don't even want to go there. | |
| There's not enough Prozac in the world. | |
| To make people feel okay about going down this block. | |
| Why did they design it like this? | |
| Why the daunting exterior combined with the expansive, foreboding, shadeless, open space in front? | |
| Again, it's about using oppressive brutalism to exert authoritarian control over the population. | |
| This, in fact, would be a better building if we put mosaic portraits of Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein... | |
| And all the other great despots of the 20th century on the side of the building, because then we'd honestly be saying what the building is really communicating to us. | |
| You know, it's a despotic building. | |
| It wants us to feel like termites. | |
| Melbourne's federal coffee palace, an ornate wonder. | |
| Demolished and replaced with a bland office tower. | |
| The most shocking thing about all this is that the appetite for modernist monstrosities in architecture only seems to be increasing. | |
| Le Corbusier isn't reviled. | |
| He's worshipped by other architects. | |
| A 2009 poll showed that the public preferred traditional architecture to modernist architecture. | |
| But more recently, attitudes seem to be changing. | |
| People queued up around the block to sign contracts to live in this deformed black box in Washington DC. Living spaces are getting smaller as the population becomes more atomized and isolated. | |
| Coffin apartments or micro-apartments are taking over major city centers. | |
| Similar to how they rewired our brains to enjoy dumbed-down, repetitive pop music. | |
| We've been indoctrinated into believing that vulgar... | |
| Is cool. | |
| In smaller cities and suburbs, instead of mixed-use environments... | |
| Everything is segregated. | |
| The tyranny of zoning has created austere pockets of hopelessness, separated by vast, soulless highways. | |
| This mechanically crushes any prospect of community or municipal dignity. | |
| We can't overestimate the amount of despair that we are generating with places like this. | |
| We're witnessing the uglification. | |
| Of the world. | |
| The globalist goal is to make the whole planet identical. | |
| In its atomizing dreariness. | |
| By dulling our senses, they hope to dull our very life essence. | |
| This is all inherently totalitarian. | |
| But in an age of ugliness, a work of beauty is an act of defiance. | |
| And thankfully, there are still small pockets of resistance. | |
| Advocates of neo-traditional architecture survive, and they're still erecting buildings like the Shermerhorn Symphony Center in Nashville, And the entire town of Poundbury in England. | |
| Look, this isn't a rant against modernity. | |
| I'm not saying that every building should be a pastiche or a facsimile. | |
| It's a rant against the hostility to the past that dominates postmodernist architecture. | |
| Just as hatred of and guilt about the past dominates virtually every aspect of postmodernism. | |
| It's a rant against the contrived exaltation of vulgarity. | |
| Which is being used as an insidious form of social engineering. | |
| Just like in art, entertainment and music, we need to rail against the relativist, collectivist, post-modernist lie. | |
| The objective standards of beauty don't exist. | |
| They do. | |
| They always will. | |
| And while taste will always be subjective, we must never accept ugliness as a form of beauty. | |
| What could be more triggering to libtards than my face and this slogan? |
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