Actually, it was on purpose. Las Vegas’s casino developers may have been slavishly dependent on outdated architectural motifs, but their modernist detractors were slavishly dependent on utopian doctrines. At one point, Venturi calls these doctrines “progressive, if not revolutionary, utopian, and puristic”; at another he mentions Modernism’s “reformist-progressive social and industrial aims.” It is clear throughout that he is looking for a polite way to say “authoritarian”:
Revolutionary eras are given to didactic symbolism and to the propagandistic use of architecture to promote revolutionary aims. This is as true for the symbolism of today’s ghetto rebuilders (African militant or middle-class conservative) as it was for the Romantic Roman republican symbolism of revolutionary France.
Modernist architecture does not give us new ways of seeing. It is an impoverishment, in fact. It ignores a varied cultural vocabulary accumulated over the centuries, because that vocabulary might endanger Modernism’s political purpose. As a project, it resembles Kemal Atatürk’s purging of the Turkish language to eliminate words with Persian, Arabic, or European roots…
By Christopher Caldwell, WeeklyStandard; excerpts, edited by Ellopos Blog; Read complete. Cf. Roger Scruton: Modernist buildings exclude dialogue
