9/1/2020 The Rise of the Architectural Cult | Articles | Inference: International Review of Scie…

The Rise of the Architectural Cult

Nikos Salingaros

Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural

Barbarism
by James Stevens Curl
Oxford University Press, 551 pp., $60.00.

Philosophy / Book Review / Vol. 5, No. 1

Architecture shapes human society and drives much of its commercial

and economic engine. The inhabited world is covered with giant glass
skyscrapers, factories, museums of contemporary art, concert halls,
university buildings, and houses. In Making Dystopia, James Stevens
Curl argues that the preferred style in which many new buildings are
created is ill adapted to the human senses, generating a permanent
condition of stress from our environment.

Curl has several goals in this scholarly, well-documented book:

Demonstrate that contemporary architectural culture, with

ideological origins in the 1920s, has created a dystopian
environment for users.
Explain how a tiny group was able to impose on the world an
architecture of abstraction that is, as Curl sees it, devoid of sense.
Show that three key figures—Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe—insisted upon the global

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homogenization of architecture and ignored local conditions of

climate, culture, and evolved traditions.
Document how biological aspects of architecture necessary for
healing environments, such as ornamentation, the human scale, a
sense of enclosure, positive tactile qualities, and complex color
harmonies, were expunged.
Examine the historical, political, and psychological reasons why
people have accepted shaping our environment in this manner.

Curl is Britain’s most distinguished architectural historian, and a

coauthor, with Susan Wilson, of the classic Oxford Dictionary of
Architecture.1 He has done decades of research into the origins of
contemporary architectural culture. He finally brings all this information
together in Making Dystopia. He is convinced that something is terribly
wrong with the way buildings look today.

Curl has dug deeply into the ideas and motivations behind the
International Style, which is characterized by plain featureless or
transparent walls, flat roofs, horizontal strip windows, the elimination of
frames and borders, pilotis (stilts that look incapable of supporting a
building’s weight), overhanging cantilevers, and a preference for gray
concrete, smooth white, or shiny metal expanses, with any colors
restricted to primary hues. The historical thread responsible for this style
goes back to the 1920s and the German architecture school known as the
Bauhaus. Between 1920 and 1970, architecture broke away from the
remaining vestiges of traditional composition. Designers using the new
style eschewed vertical alignment, axis symmetries, nested bilateral
symmetries, scale symmetries, and material connections among tectonic
components.

Curl does not view such changes as progress, but as an assault on the
human senses. Elements of traditional architecture that the modernist

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movement eliminates arose from much deeper sources than artistic taste.
They correspond to evolutionary factors that shaped human bodies for
survival.2 This is evident from emotional responses to natural and
traditional architectural forms. Recent scientific advances have also
provided support for the notion that architectural environments influence
wellbeing.3

Why would architects in the 1920s turn their backs on vital mechanisms
for connecting humans to the world, necessary to ensure long-term
mental and physical health? It is certainly true that the neurological
mechanisms for relating to our environment were unknown back then.
Curl argues, in addition, that a small group of architects sought to
achieve fame by promoting a novelty that turned out to be
counterintuitive and dangerous. He devotes roughly the first 200 pages
of his book to documenting how this agenda was implemented.

Curl also addresses topics such as the science of design, cults and
substitute religions, and how totalitarian systems arise. The book starts
as architectural history and becomes an indictment of a movement. The
contemporary built environment, dictated primarily by style, lacks key
geometrical features that human biology craves. Scientists, who should
have been the first to notice this discrepancy, unwisely or naively left the
shaping of our world in the hands of the architects.

A Foothold
The single undoubted success of the modernist movement was to spread
through clever propaganda: first by co-opting the term “modern,” then
by covering up a long string of practical failures. Buildings in the
modernist canon weather poorly, and post-occupancy evaluations are
largely negative.4 To promote such viscerally unattractive architecture,

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modernism’s supporters had to deprecate the neurological and

physiological responses of its users.

In Making Dystopia, Curl describes how architectural culture justifies its

predilections using the flimsiest of motives. Architecture is supposed to
house people and human activities in a comfortable manner, but the
Bauhaus overturned this principle in the interest of originality. A
political motivation was also evident: rejecting traditional architectural
adaptation meant turning against history, which coincided with the
revolutionary agenda after World War I.5 The radical switch to the
International Style for new constructions could never have been made
without the support of powerful institutions and the media.6 A
combination of global capital, government, and other institutional
support guaranteed that the International Style became officially
sanctioned. Architectural revolutionaries adopted the then-innovative
techniques of mass advertising to propagate their iconoclastic style. As
the media played the role of willing advocates rather than watchdogs and
whistle-blowers, emerging problems with the new architecture were not
publicized. Making Dystopia is full of historical tidbits expunged from
the official record.

Education as Conditioning
Curl describes how the Bauhaus philosophy of architecture became a
cult, ingrained in students through rituals, diets, assignments, and an
exclusive sublanguage.7 The trio of Le Corbusier, Gropius, and Mies
came to be seen as the holy trinity of architecture. The Bauhaus offered
young people a complete and simplistic worldview with every detail
filled in, and a sacred cause that provided emotional and spiritual
fulfillment. A massive mental manipulation began when other
architecture schools adopted the Bauhaus design exercises, which simply
indoctrinated students to uncritically accept what they were taught.8 In
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postwar architecture courses taught in schools throughout the world,

students are still compelled to copy stereotypes of industrial modernism
and its offshoots. Traditional buildings are presented as products of an
irrelevant bygone era, with the strict injunction that they cannot be used
as models for building today.

For decades, students wishing to learn design techniques that adapt to

human biology have had to do it entirely on their own and covertly so.9
They have used out-of-print books on composition and patterns,
searched the scientific literature, and found practitioners who transmit
the oral history of more biologically adapted architecture. Mainstream
architecture textbooks are useless for this purpose since they promote
nonadaptive, image-centered design as the only style that architects may
practice without risking becoming outcasts.10 Most of today’s traditional
practitioners obtained their education in this way, outside the educational
system.

Architectural educators are in a state of denial. A 2018 survey of British

architecture students by the Architects’ Journal posed the question: “If
you are intending to go into practice, has your architectural education
provided you with the knowledge you need?” Thirty-five percent of the
respondents said no, and 27% said they were unsure—sure signs that the
system is headed toward irrelevance.11 Recent graduates have been
conditioned, through the Bauhaus exercises, to think in abstract images,
rather than work in the skills the profession requires.12 In the US, about
6,000 architecture graduates every year compete for 2,500 available
jobs.13 Most are fit to do little other than produce image-centered
designs. Despite claims that students are trained in scientific modernism,
they are mostly ignorant of the scientific method.

The Architectural Power System

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In his book, Curl describes the inexorable rise of a power movement.

With curtain-wall construction, the weight of a building is carried on a
central steel frame, and the glass walls are not structurally relevant. This
offered a cheap way to build large buildings with maximum floor-space
occupancy. The use of glass did incorporate one component of biophilia
into the modernist design: it let in lots of light, which disinfects the air.14
Nevertheless, the negative effects of using glass—such as glare, poor
thermal insulation, fragility, problems with sealants at the joints—were
pointedly ignored.15 The use of plate glass was fueled by the glass
industry’s publicity campaign, beginning with their commission of
Bruno Taut’s Glass Pavilion, built in 1914.16 Once adopted by the
building industry, whether private or state, the style became
institutionalized. Today, massive and continuous building activity
worldwide fails to generate truly biophilic structure. But to question the
inhumanity of architecture stripped of all biological meaning is to
question a booming trillion-dollar industry.

Not all architects are part of this massive worldwide movement.

Nonetheless, dissenters from orthodoxy are typically denounced and
evicted from the system. Usually this means exclusion from architecture
prizes, important commissions, academic posts, and mentions in the
literature.17 For many architects, dissension marks a cessation of their
ability to work, as condemnation on stylistic grounds scares off
prospective clients. The names of those who have fallen victim to the
cult of industrial modernism are missing from architectural history.18 In
his book, Curl has attempted to rehabilitate those excellent architects
who were expunged from the canon. Several generations of practitioners
innovated from within the tradition of adaptive design, and a great deal
can be learned from those practitioners today.

Further proof of the system’s intolerance can be seen in the varying

responses to the publication of Making Dystopia. Critics representing
established architectural societies condemned the book out of hand,
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without even apparently reading it, let alone assessing the arguments
offered by the author. Among several positive reviews, three are
particularly noteworthy. Britain’s greatest living philosopher, Sir Roger
Scruton, heartily endorsed it.19 And Anthony Daniels, hailed as “the
Orwell of our time,”20 wrote two glowing reviews, one under his nom de
plume Theodore Dalrymple.21 The contrast between these reviews and
those from architectural sources is striking.

Architectural Culture Threatens

Scientific Culture
Through millennia of building activity, humans discovered forms,
shapes, and spaces that positively affect health. These are expressed in
traditional regional building canons.22 This evolution of architectural
form was driven by adaptivity, not formalism. Towards the end of his
book, Curl explains how science validates traditional, evolved solutions
to buildings and cities.23 Recent results in biophilia, complexity, design
patterns, fractals, and neuroscience establish a mathematically ordered
conception of form.24 Astonishing parallels have been noticed between
evolved connective patterns in traditional architecture and the basic
geometrical building blocks of organisms.25

When, in the early twentieth century, accumulated knowledge was

jettisoned in favor of new and untested building typologies, evidence-
based design was dismissed. The observation of C. P. Snow on the
separation of “the two cultures” is relevant here.26 The sciences and the
humanities have never welcomed reconciliation. One casualty in the rift
is architecture, which is left on an uncertain epistemological foundation.
The biologist E. O. Wilson attempted to bridge the gap between the two
cultures with his notion of consilience.27 My own work argues that a

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wholesale revision is necessary to bring architectural culture more in

line with other evidence-based disciplines.28

To justify anxiety-inducing typologies of architecture, its supporters

have had to use unscientific modes of explanation: something other than
human sensory responses and principles of mathematical coherence.
Explanations were pulled together from revolutionary political ideology,
cultish dogma, and a garbled misuse of scientific vocabulary,
particularly from the approach of deconstruction.29 The result has not
convinced everyone. Most people in modern times still prefer to inhabit
traditional buildings.30 Among today’s major global industries is mass
tourism to locations with historic architecture. Still the economy
continues to run by erecting predominately industrial-modernist
structures.

Letters to the Editors

Building Bad
by James Stevens Curl, reply by Nikos Salingaros

1. James Stevens Curl and Susan Wilson, The Oxford Dictionary of

Architecture, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

2. Nikos Salingaros, (Amherst, MA: OfftheCommonBooks, 2015). Nikos

Salingaros, (Portland: Sustasis Press, 2006; Kathmandu, Nepal: Vajra
Books, 2014).

3. James Stevens Curl, Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival
of Architectural Barbarism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018),

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332. Michael Bond, “,” BBC Future, June 6, 2017.

4. Curl, Making Dystopia, 238.

5. Nikos Salingaros, , 4th ed. (Kathmandu, Nepal: Vajra Books, 2016).

6. Curl, Making Dystopia, 248–83.

7. Curl, Making Dystopia, 94–95, 100, 311, 364.

8. I have said as much also in Nikos Salingaros, “,” Common Edge, June
8, 2017.

9. Miguel Córdova Ramírez, “” Metropolis, 26 July 2017.

10. Curl, Making Dystopia, 356, 364–79.

11. Ella Jessel, “Student Survey: Only the Rich Need Apply to Study
Architecture,” Architects’ Journal 245, no. 14 (July 25, 2018).

12. Salingaros, “.”

13. Duo Dickinson, “: How the Great Recession Shaped This Generation’s
Entry into Architecture,” Common Edge, November 6, 2018.

14. Evidence suggests that ultraviolet rays have disinfectant qualities.

Lloyd Alter, “ – It is the Best Disinfectant,” TreeHugger, October 25,
2018. Salingaros, .

15. Curl, Making Dystopia, 372.

16. Curl, Making Dystopia, 40.

17. Brianna Rennix and Nathan Robinson, “,” Current Affairs, October 31,
2017.

18. Curl, Making Dystopia, 226–39.

19. Sir Roger Scruton, “,” New Design Ideas 2, no. 2 (2018): 133–35.

20. Denis Dutton, quoted in “,” The Skeptical Doctor (2019).

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21. Anthony Daniels, “,” Quadrant, November 4, 2018. Theodore

Dalrymple, “,” New English Review, October 1, 2018.

22. Christopher Alexander et al., A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings,

Construction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). Nikos
Salingaros, “Pattern Language,” in The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia
of Social Theory¸ ed. Bryan Turner et al. (2017),
doi:10.1002/9781118430873.est0504.

23. Curl, Making Dystopia, 331–32.

24. Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, 4 vols. (Berkeley: Center

for Environmental Structure, 2001–2004). An overview of the series
can be found . Nikos Salingaros, (Portland: Sustasis Foundation,
2013). Michael Mehaffy and Nikos Salingaros, (Portland: Sustasis
Foundation, 2014).

25. Stuart Newman and Ramray Bhat, “,” International Journal of

Developmental Biology 53, nos. 5–6 (2009): 693–705.

26. C. P. Snow, (London: Cambridge University Press, 2001 [1959]).

27. E. O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York:

Vintage Books, 1998).

28. Salingaros, . Salingaros, .

29. Salingaros, . Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense:

Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (New York: Picador,
1998).

30. Audun Engh, “” Journal of Urbanism 2, no. 3 (2009): 191.

Published on December 12, 2019 in Volume 5, Issue 1.

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