{"id":350,"date":"2017-10-29T04:41:41","date_gmt":"2017-10-29T01:41:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=350"},"modified":"2017-10-29T04:41:41","modified_gmt":"2017-10-29T01:41:41","slug":"roger-scruton-modernist-buildings-exclude-dialogue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/350\/roger-scruton-modernist-buildings-exclude-dialogue\/","title":{"rendered":"Roger Scruton: Modernist buildings exclude dialogue"},"content":{"rendered":"

Scruton presents Krier’s architectural proposal as an antidote to modernist architectures, trying to “extract” the general principles of a healthy architecture, as reflected in the history of Europe. Here are select excerpts from\u00a0Scruton’s, Cities for Living (City Journal<\/a>), which you can combine with Scruton’s, Architecture needs a grammar<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Scruton rightly traces the origin of the European city in Ancient Greece, but he tends to forget that the buildings, types and logic he admires were developed in the Middle Ages, in the Christian<\/em> Europe. In ancient Greece too religion was the ground of common life. Only in the Hellenistic cities after Alexander the religious bond was really weakened, already declined in Greece – a weakening that made possible Alexander’s very exodus to the East. This ‘interval’ between ancient Greek religion and Christianity, a period irrelevant with the concept of ancient City<\/strong>, created the city as just a common abode.<\/p>\n

After the christening of Hellenism the ancient city reappears transformed by the new religion. Anyone who admires the European city, needs to recognize by thinking its historical course, that this city cannot be a place where people will be united only by “social networks, economic cooperation, and friendly competition through sports and festivals”! We like it or not, European Union needs Christianity<\/strong>. If we deny this future for Europe, we cannot in the same time dream of and fight for an architecture that will be European, unless we are ready to abandon all contact with reality. Cf<\/em>. Scruton’s books<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Roger Scruton, Modernist buildings exclude dialogue<\/strong><\/p>\n

The city, as we have inherited it from the ancient Greeks, is both an institution and a way of life, one coterminous with the civilization of Europe.<\/p>\n

The confluence of strangers in a single place and under a single law, there to live peacefully side by side, joined by social networks, economic cooperation, and friendly competition through sports and festivals, is among the most remarkable achievements of our species, responsible for most of the great cultural, political, and religious innovations of our civilization.<\/p>\n

Nothing is more precious in the Western heritage, therefore, than the cities of Europe, recording the triumph of civilized humanity not only in their orderly streets, majestic facades, and public monuments, but also in their smallest architectural details and the intricate play of light on their cornices and apertures.<\/p>\n

The American who leaves the routes prescribed by the Ministries of Tourism will quickly see that Paris is miraculous in no small measure because modern architects have not been able to get their hands on it. Elsewhere, European cities are going the way of cities in America: high-rise offices in the center, surrounded first by a ring of lawless dereliction, and then by the suburbs, to which those who work in the city flee at the end of the day.<\/p>\n

Admittedly, nothing in Europe compares with the vandalism that modernists have wreaked on Buffalo, Tampa, or Minneapolis (to take three examples of American cities that cause me particular pain). Nevertheless, the same moral disaster is beginning to afflict us\u2014the disaster of cities in which no one wishes to live, where public spaces are vandalized and private spaces boarded up.<\/p>\n

Until recently, European architects have either connived at the evisceration of our cities or actively promoted it. Relying on the spurious rhetoric of Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, they endorsed the totalitarian projects of the political elite, whose goal after the war was not to restore the cities but to clear away the \u201cslums.\u201d By \u201cslums,\u201d they meant the harmonious classical streets of affordable houses, seeded with local industries, corner shops, schools, and places of worship, that had made it possible for real communities to flourish in the center of our towns.<\/p>\n

High-rise blocks in open parkland, of the kind that Le Corbusier proposed in his plan for the demolition of Paris north of the Seine, would replace them. Meanwhile, all forms of employment and enjoyment would move elsewhere. Public buildings would be expressly modernist, with steel and concrete frames and curtain walls, but with no facades or intelligible apertures, and no perceivable relation to their neighbors. Important monuments from the past would remain, but often set in new and aesthetically annihilating contexts, such as that provided for Saint Paul\u2019s in London.<\/p>\n

Traditional architecture produced forms expressive of human interests\u2014palaces, houses, factories, churches, temples\u2014and these sit easily under their names. The forms of modern architecture, Krier argues, are nameless\u2014denoting not familiar objects and their uses but \u201cso-called objects,\u201d known best by nicknames, and never by real names of their own. Thus the Berlin Congress Hall is the \u201cpregnant oyster,\u201d Le Corbusier\u2019s Unit\u00e9 d\u2019Habitation in Marseilles the \u201cmadhouse,\u201d the new building at Queen\u2019s College, Oxford, the \u201cparking lot,\u201d and the UN building in New York the \u201cradiator.\u201d<\/p>\n

The nickname, in Krier\u2019s view, is the correct term for a kitsch object\u2014for a faked object that sits in its surroundings like a masked stranger at a family party. Classical forms, by contrast, result from convention and consensus over centuries; they earn their names\u2014house, palace, church, factory\u2014from the natural understanding that they elicit, with nothing about them forced.<\/p>\n

Modernist forms have been imposed upon us by people in the grip of ideology. They derive no human significance from the materials that compose them, from the labor that produced them, or from the function that they fulfill, and their monumental quality is faked.<\/p>\n

Krier identifies the leading error of modernism as that introduced by Le Corbusier, Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: separating load-bearing and outward-facing parts. Once buildings become curtains hung on invisible frames, all of the understood ways of creating and conveying meanings lose out. Even if the curtain is shaped like a classical facade, it is a pretend facade, with only a blank expression.<\/p>\n

Usually, however, it is a sheet of glass or concrete panels, without intelligible apertures. The building itself is hidden, and its posture as a member of the city, standing among neighbors and resting its weight upon their common ground, is meaningless because unobservable. All relation to neighboring structures, to the street, and to the sky, is lost. The form conveys nothing beyond the starkness of its geometry.<\/p>\n

The curtain-wall idiom has other negative effects. Buildings constructed in this way are both expensive to maintain and of uncertain durability; they use materials that no one fully understands, which have a coefficient of expansion so large that all joints loosen within a few years, and which involve massive environmental damage in their production and in their inevitable disposal within a few decades.<\/p>\n

Modernist buildings are health catastrophes: sealed environments, dependent on a constant input of energy, and subject to the \u201csick-building syndrome\u201d that arises when nobody can open a window or let in a breath of fresh air. Moreover, such buildings use no architectural vocabulary, so that one cannot \u201cread\u201d them as one does classical buildings. The passerby experiences this as a kind of rudeness. Modernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the void that they create around themselves is not a public space but a desertification.<\/p>\n

This failure to provide a readable vocabulary is not a trivial defect of modernist styles: it is the reason why modernist buildings fail to harmonize with their neighbors. In architecture, as in music, harmony is a relation among independently meaningful parts, an achievement of order from elements that create and respond to valency. There are no chords in modernist architecture, only lines\u2014lines that may come to an end but that achieve no closure.<\/p>\n

Cf<\/em>. Scruton’s books at Amazon<\/a>;\u00a0 The European Prospect<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Scruton presents Krier’s architectural proposal as an antidote to modernist architectures, trying to “extract” the general principles of a healthy architecture, as reflected in the history of Europe. Here are select excerpts from\u00a0Scruton’s, Cities for Living (City Journal), which you can combine with Scruton’s, Architecture needs a grammar. Scruton rightly traces the origin of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[9,2,46],"tags":[539,62,58,703,166,167,754,753],"class_list":["post-350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-greek-architecture","category-philosophy","tag-alexander","tag-ancient-greece","tag-ancient-greek-religion","tag-architecture","tag-christianity","tag-european-union","tag-roger-scruton","tag-walter-gropius"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}