Growing older has its consolations. Among them are a blessed respite from the tumultuous urgencies of youth, and the time and perspective for contemplation and deeper understanding.
That perspective and understanding can, however, leave the contemplative geezer feeling at times downright disconsolate, when he looks around himself and sees how much there is in our Brave New World that is simply, and self-evidently, wrong.
Here’s an exhibit for the prosecution: an essay on the dehumanizing monstrosities of modern architecture.
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The article actually made me feel better. It’s a critique of modern architecture from the Left! The more, the merrier in the fight to maintain human dignity.
You have probably heard the ancient Greek maxim, “command shows the man.” It of course means that the real nature of my personality is revealed when I have the power to do as I please. And in most cases that personality is revealed as more or less hideous. Hence Lord Acton’s famous quip about power corrupting, and absolute power corrupting absolutely. The dominant social thought of the modern age rejects this view, and asserts that we would all be lovely creatures if we were only allowed to blossom into our true selves, but an older wisdom says that social constraints save us from ourselves.
You may well wonder what any of this has to do with modern architecture. Well, an architect wishes to “command,” by which he means design without interference from his client or the community. A superstar architect come closest to “commanding,” since he can turn down any project that does’t allow him to “express himself,” which is to say “show the man.” And the man that gets “shown,” more often than not, is a misanthropic egotist.
Now this tendency is exacerbated when the client is also in a “command position,” such as the state, a corporation, or an endowed institution. Your dentist might hate you in his heart, but he can’t afford to “show” it with a waiting room that looks like a gas chamber. But those institutions in a “command position” are beyond caring what you think.
Let an arrogant institution hire an arrogant architect, and the results follow like a logical demonstration.
Steve Sailer has featured a few complementary posts to yours in the last few days, including this one — for kicks:
“The Man Behind the World’s Ugliest Buildings”
A bit crude, but fitting.