He carried into the arena his most recent book Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism. Into this arena of Modernism’s over-confident self-denial strode James Stevens Curl, a British architect and architectural historian, an accomplished scholar whose love of language is evidenced by his authorship of two dictionaries and one encyclopedia on architecture. In view of a growing societal discontent with architects, and perhaps in reaction to it, there has been in recent years a “doubling down” by the architecture and planning establishment on the irrefutable errors of Modernism and the undeniable havoc it has wreaked on our buildings, towns, cities, and landscapes. Yet the architecture profession and, even more critically, most schools of architecture, remain obstinate in their waywardness. While there are currently signs of a coming reorientation, architecture’s center of gravity, attracted by the dictates and fashions of Modernism and Postmodernism, has shifted so far away from society’s that the profession is a regular source of popular derision and even contempt. Applied also to city planning, these ideas have rendered great damage to once-beautiful cities the world over. Materials used to build buildings would need to be the same materials used in manufacture and transportation: steel, glass and concrete. Architects were no longer to look to excellent examples of previous architecture for inspiration, but to current and futuristic examples of manufacture and transportation. Houses were no longer homes but “machines,” and as machines they required a machine aesthetic. Unfortunately for the arts and architecture, much progress was made advancing that false notion. The onset of the twentieth century was welcomed by a coterie of central European and Russian thinkers as the opportunity to supplant the benefit of humanity with “progress” as the true end of all human endeavor. The same record also shows that when it comes to our buildings and cities, for some set of reasons in the early twentieth century, things started to go sideways, quickly, and with lasting effect. The built record of our cities, towns, villages and hamlets, our churches, capitals, train stations, and houses provides ample demonstration of the fact that beauty and nobility in architecture used to be much more common. That said, it used to occur with greater frequency than it does now. Great architecture, like any example of excellence, is and always has been fairly rare. Since then, mankind has been at great pains making buildings for human use.įor millennia, we got it mostly right and that is no small feat, for the design of buildings is as difficult as their construction is laborious. Implicit in the need for God to fashion clothing for Adam and Eve was the need for the couple to fashion a dwelling for themselves. A paraphrase of the definition of the word “Language”Īrchitecture-the arts of designing and building conjoined-has been with us created human beings since the fall of man. Webster’s International Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd ed., unabridged (1949)Īrchitecture: A body of building forms and methods of combining building forms used and understood by a considerable community. Language: A body of words and methods of combining words used and understood by a considerable community.
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