How Industrial Society Destroys Culture

by LON KRIER
From a talk given to the Royal Institute of British Architects on 4 May 1982. Published as "The Reconstruction of the European City" in: RIBA Transactions, volume 1, number 2 (1982), pages 36-44.

"Like William Morris, Lon Krier is dedicated to the cause of beauty: that gives his work an edge and an individuality which many people would rather be without. If his polemic seems at times simplistic, it is I believe his concern for the loss of beauty that has reached a level close to despair, and if his words at times sound shrill it is because his ideas have been met so often by indifference or complacency." -- Robert Maxwell, from the introduction to Lon Krier's talk.

Industrial society, like no other, is a society of human beings, a society which is obsessed with work, and yet the result of its work is but trivia and destruction. Now it even risks running out of work, and what then? I am going to explain to you a few ideas which are central to my work and my somewhat difficult relationship to the times I have to live in. Those ideas won't have any great bearing on the future of architecture for the simple reason that architecture has no place in an industrial civilization. I therefore never test the validity of ideas on whether they are going to have an influence, but rather on whether they are true. Many of you have very little respect for the ideas of William Morris or John Ruskin because, quite truly, they have had, so far, no important effect. I myself am rather concerned about the truth of an argument; a hundred years after Jesus Christ had hung on the cross, Christianity was still a very minor affair. Efficiency and immediate effectiveness of ideas are no demonstration of their truth or of their profound value. I am going to talk about monofunctional zoning. I will have to talk about it till the end of my life, but far from liking it, I have to do it for nobody else seems to want to treat the subject with the gravity it deserves. Zoning is an obsession, a most devastating phenomenon which both the means and the cause of our society's agony. Zoning is at the center of the impossibility of today's architecture, the impossibility of creating objects of beauty and permanence; in other words, of building cities. Monofunctional zoning does not so much allow things to happen; rather it forces one activity to happen to the exclusion of all other activities. As it has been in the South

Atlantic a zone is always an 'exclusion zone'. Furthermore a zone is a place either where everything which is not strictly obligatory is forbidden, or where everything which is not strictly forbidden is obligatory. It is how you define a prison or a tyranny. Zoning replaces rights and liberties by commandments and orders. Today monofunctional zoning is indeed so total in its effects, and such an organic part of our way of living and thinking, that very few people realize how far their own lives are directed and dictated by it. Our society moans and complains a lot; we are surrounded by a very strong consensus that everything must change, and believe me politicians of all persuasions are just as unhappy with this society. So, too, architects complain about their poor education, authority and pay. They moan about their desperate fate; always to be having to design houses that are too small or office blocks that are too big on deserted sites which are always too small or too big, and always away from the center of life. They in fact complain about their inability to create places of worth and beauty. And yet they do not complain about zoning. Like so many forms of pollution, zoning has polluted our minds. It has become a moral disease and it is that disease which I am diagnosing and which I know how to heal. Industrial society and artisanal society are not just historical phases which follow each other, they are also contradictory forms of organizing human data, work and production. Furthermore industrial forms of production not only replace artisanal ones but they willfully and fatally mean their destruction. A society of architects and craftsmen tends to build an environment which is permanent, beautiful, solid and comfortable; that is its supreme idea at least. An industrial society, on the contrary, tends to transform the entire planet into a huge building site, which will never reach satisfactory completion because it always promises that tomorrow will be infinitely better than today. However obscure their ultimate goals and plans, progress and change, striving for no describable ends, have become ends in themselves. That is why industrial society is more interested in the process of work than in objects which are the result of work. An artist or craftsman wants an object to be beautiful because he wants it to be permanent and solid. You can only love objects which are beautiful; that is also why you want them to be with you as long as possible and finally to outlive you. How could you possibly love an ugly object? Ugly objects do not want permanency, they want to be used and thrown away. For example, if you build the most beautifully furnished prison nobody will ever love it because in itself it has no permanence. That is why it is not in the nature of prisons to be beautiful. Now you know that industry is not interested in beauty, in creating a beautiful planet. Industrial culture is indeed, therefore, a contradiction in terms. In an artistic and artisanal culture manual and intellectual work enter into a fruitful marriage. However different their natures, they live in harmony and create objects of harmony and of beauty. However strenuous a pianist's work may be, if he is modestly talented he will always enjoy his work, and as a result give pleasure to those who listen to his efforts. Industry on the other hand always works at the expense of people's pleasure. It

uses their bodies, their muscles and their brains, not for their own pleasures, but for its own mysterious purposes. Industrial culture therefore is an unresolvable contradiction. Industry develops at the expense of culture, which is why every so often it explodes with such violence, and why it has to dominate our lives more and more completely in order to survive. The greatest achievement of industry is not only to produce ever growing millions of unemployed individuals (workers and intellectuals), of unemployed hands and brains, but to transform them into totally unproductive, dependent and socially harmless individuals -- it reduces millions of strong and intelligent creatures of God to an army of miserable, frustrated and impotent victims. These millions are not only incapable of forming articulate political organizations, but as victims of industrial education they are morally and manually incapable of competing productively with any of the industrial monopolies. Industry literally puts out of business not only millions of hands, but above all millions of brains. Isn't it scandalous that at a moment when the European Community counts more than 22 million unemployed hands, good handwork has virtually become unaffordable by a normal client? When 11 million brains are idle all over Europe, not a single one is employing itself with any success in working out a project which could lead a society out of this state of industrial gangrene. For however bleak the reality, most people are all too disposed to believe industrial propaganda, which of course is still selling industrialization as the only path to a better future, as the fulfillment of time itself. That is the reason why I have to remain on a level of polemic, which to some people may sound simplistic. But the great truths of our life are very simple. There is life and there is death. For me industrialization is not a result of human strength but of human weakness. It is that moment when responsible people forget what the place of things has to be. It is that moment in history when a minor part of all human activities begins to exceed the limits of its role; when the part becomes the whole. In that role, industry has become the enemy of individual human beings as well as of entire cultures. I call those who collaborate in that project 'collaborators', just as the French Resistance talked about Nazi collaborateurs. Within our profession there are very few conscious resistors and an army of unconscious ones. In England I respect only one architect as a professional man -- I have confidence only in Quinlan Terry. I have a lot of friends, all very nice people, but they are all and without exception testing ideas. Architects and town planners cannot test ideas, they must build houses, palaces and cities, or else create disasters. Unfortunately, that is what they have been doing for two generations now. How could anyone respect them? Professional respect is, after all, something which you have to earn. Town planning as a science and an art has been dead for even longer than architecture. This may all sound a little too somber, and not a few of you will feel a little uncomfortable about the idea that Baron Haussmann, rather than being a lackey of the

bourgeoisie, should now be seen as the last great resistor to the empire of industrial capitalism. I also know that on these occasions I can only convince people who already believe in my ideas. Ideas are very slow to promote. Any industrialist will tell you that. So how much longer will it take to promote a great idea? But beware: things are not as simple as they may sound; the reconstruction of the European city is not one idea but a rather big family of great ideas. So far I have only managed to create confusion. But isn't it true that it is only confused minds that can be confused even more? Confusion is a state of despair, and one only feels despair if one feels powerless, dependent and unfree. For myself, I am a weak individual. I have rather shaky health which is upset at the slightest discomfort. An ugly chair and a few bars of pop music cause me headaches and respiratory difficulties. That is why I have to be very careful, and it is also why, having to live my life in the midst of this industrial abyss and filth, I had to think how to protect myself. I had to understand what hurt me and what really pleased me. I then found out that if you are to create beautiful and pleasant objects, if you are to build cities that people want to dream about and live their lives in and dare to have children in, you need to be loved and respected. An artist who wants to impose anything on society is a sort of irresponsible idiot. It is not the artist who has to impose on and court society. It is society, it is private or public clients, who must surround the artists and architects and town planners with respect and love. If today's architects and town planners are ready to serve anybody anywhere, the reason is that they have forgotten to serve their only master, that is the genius of European Architecture and the City.