Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and

Survival of Architectural Barbarism

(James Stevens Curl)
August 27, 2019

High architecture, that of grand buildings, is a bridge between God

and man, and a sinew binding state and people, the ruling class and
the masses. Low architecture, that of daily living and daily use, is key
to satisfaction in the life of a populace. Thus, a coherent and uplifting
architecture, high and low, is, and has always been, necessary for any
successful society. I will return below to what architecture we should
have, why, and what needs to be done to achieve it. Today, though, we
most definitely don’t have a coherent and uplifting architecture, and
Robert Stevens Curl, in Making Dystopia, explains what the abomination
of Modernism is and why it utterly dominates our current architecture.
Curl’s aim is to prove that both architects and society have swallowed
the most appalling lies, and been in thrall to the most stupid delusions,
for many decades. And since architecture is not mere abstraction, but
rather something that affects the lives of everyone, this is a societal
disaster of the first order. Built on propagandistic falsehoods designed
to conceal the ideological nature of the project, Modernism is a cult,
devoted to destroying opposition and both unwilling and unable to
defend its myriad fatal debilities. It has destroyed the urban fabric all
over the globe, and thereby hugely harmed the social fabric. So-called
post-modernist successors to Modernism, namely Deconstructivism
and Parametricism, are little better. Curl offers no quarter; Modernism
and all its works should be erased.
The author is a well-known British art historian, author of more
than forty books. This book, written as an “exposé of the ideologies
of those responsible for an environmental and cultural disaster on a
massive scale,” with its great heft, thick paper, and numerous photo-
graphs, screams “expensive”—too expensive, in fact, for the casual
reader, unfortunately. Moreover, there is too much repetition and too
much rantiness; the book could have done with less variation on the
same prose points and more pictures to illustrate the innumerable refer-
ences Curl makes in the text and the voluminous footnotes. And Curl
makes little or no effort to make his text accessible to someone who is

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a complete novice to architectural history (nor, for the same reason, is

it possible for someone not well versed in architectural history, such as
me, to wholly say how accurate the history Curl offers is).
The result is a book that is self-limiting. But I don’t think Curl wanted
Making Dystopia to be a best-seller. I think he’s aware of the book’s limi-
tations. He is old, and most likely his target is not casual readers, but
young architects—those who have been or are being brainwashed in
the vast majority of architectural schools today (the sole exception he
mentions, repeatedly, is the University of Notre Dame). I suspect that
he mostly hopes that select audience will read his book as part of their
education, and that he will, after he is dead, thereby help to break the
stranglehold of Modernism. He even offers the reader a drawing of
himself, dead in a chair, with a personified “Death come as a friend to
continue ringing the warning bell.” In this context, the book as written
makes perfect sense.
Most of Making Dystopia is straight history of Modernism, focusing
in turn on several different times and places, alternating (often on the
same page) with hammer-and-tongs attacks on Modernism. Since any
style known as “modern” risks circular definition, Curl begins with
classification. Namely, that Modernism in architecture and modern
design is that style “opposed to academicism, historicism, and tradi-
tion, embracing that which is self-consciously new or fashionable, with
pronounced tendencies toward abstraction.” It originated, and the word
first began to be used, in the 1920s, to describe “the new architecture
from which all ornament, historical allusions, and traditional forms
had been expunged.” Modernism, in its 1920s post-war context, made
a certain type of sense as an experimental movement. But for reasons
Curl identifies, none of which are that “Modernism is better,” it swal-
lowed the world, becoming the global compulsory style and destroying
much of the world’s urban fabric with stale, ugly, unrealistic, short-lived,
and expensive buildings that did not fit their environment and made no
effort whatsoever to serve their actual primary purpose—to be places
in which to live and work, or to make grand statements unifying the
society in which they were built. Instead, Modernism created the inhu-
man, uncomfortable and divisive.
Modernism as a self-limited, organically-arising change, where the
style would have soon enough have passed on like Art Deco or Art
 The Worthy House 3

Nouveau, might have made some sense. Change is in the nature of

art, and while Modernism was a rupture, not normal organic change,
it could perhaps have been accommodated as one of architectural
history’s dead ends. Some of the early Modernist architecture has a
certain stark beauty, after all. But why should a few architects, stand-
ing in opposition to thousands of years of organic movement, have
succeeded in destroying in the way they did? Curl chalks it up to the
general turn among the taste-making classes against tradition and in
favor of anything cast as “original,” which while problematic in litera-
ture or food, was disastrous in architecture, a far more public form of
art with far broader consequences than fads in more ephemeral areas.
Whereas prior to the 1920s even an average architect could create nice-
looking buildings that fit their purpose, in the urban landscape and for
the people who lived or worked there, simply by using pattern books,
now a vulgar supposed originality was required. Modernism aimed at
utopian social engineering totally unmoored from the past. And as with
other similar twentieth-century ideologues, by convincing the right
people, in this case the taste-making classes and, just as importantly,
big business, Modernists were successful in their engineering efforts.
Still, they required a mythology, in the way of kings fashioning false
genealogies. This was provided by Nikolaus Pevsner, who in 1936 pub-
lished the still-influential Pioneers of the Modern Movement, an attempt to
tie admired nineteenth-century styles such as Arts and Crafts to the
modernism of men like Walter Gropius. It was Pevsner who made silly
claims, believed by nearly all today, such as that the Glasgow School
of Art was a Modernist building, rather than “a brilliant eclectic design,
drawing on Art Nouveau themes,” which was organically derived from
other styles, instead of being a rupture with them. Curl deconstructs
Pevsner at some length, giving numerous textual and pictorial examples
of his “selectivity and exaggerated claims,” propaganda “based on wish-
ful thinking,” since proving that Modernism was a rupture is key to
Curl’s criticism of it. Curl’s goal is to undercut this “Grand Narrative,”
which is ubiquitous among architects today, and show that Modernism
has no clothes.
The real origin of Modernism was sui generis, in Germany immedi-
ately after World War I. Everything was up in the air, so architecture was
too, and all the visual arts. In 1919 the Bauhaus art school was formed
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by Walter Gropius under government aegis. Nominally apolitical, the

Bauhaus was in fact a den of radical politics (liberally larded with nut-
tiness), harshly opposed to all tradition, whose artists regarded art as a
necessary herald and handmaiden of political change, and human life
as meaningless without reference to politics. Although architecture
was not the main focus of the Bauhaus, in the ferment of the 1920s
its principles rapidly infected German au courant architectural think-
ing, both in terms of design and in the rejection of the need for any
underlying skills in craft.
German architects in the 1920s and 1930s not only embraced
Modernism, they also embraced architecture as part of system build-
ing. As Thomas Hughes discusses in American Genesis, the 1920s were
the time when technological inventions became servants to their own
creations, large systems built around new technology. Modernist archi-
tects embraced this as the wave of the future—that is, the future was
technology and machines, and buildings, rather than reflecting human
uses, should now reflect machine uses, from electricity to motor cars.
In architecture, the Bauhaus had ties to the Deutscher Werkbund of the
previous decade, a group devoted to experimentation in architecture
in pursuit of integrating modern mass production techniques into
industrial design, and this type of system became part of the ground
for drastic change in architectural style.
Curl offers innumerable examples, in narrative and in picture, of
different architects and architecture of this time. The most influential
architect to emerge from the Bauhaus was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe,
who over the period from 1910 to 1930 abandoned neo-Classicism
for the so-called International Style of Modernism, much of which he
originated. Mies was a self-promoter eager to work for anyone in power;
he was the last director of the Bauhaus, and having tried and failed to
ingratiate himself with the National Socialists, he emigrated to the
United States in 1937. Many of the German avant-garde also emigrated;
they later spun stories of their opposition to Hitler, some of which were
true, but as Curl points out, the National Socialists were not nearly as
opposed to Modernist architecture as is often suggested—they were
“ambivalent,” being most definitely not conservatives, but revolutionar-
ies, and therefore attracted to certain of the ideological underpinnings
 The Worthy House 5

of Modernist architecture. In particular, they “accepted Modernism

for industrial architecture,” as well as for quite a bit of worker housing.
While some architects outside Germany expressed interest in
Modernism, especially the long-lived and ever-varied Philip Johnson,
making it a niche taste among the elite, it was only when many Bauhaus
and Bauhaus-sympathetic architects emigrated from Germany (the
“Bauhäusler”) that the International Style actually became international.
The Bauhäusler were eagerly promoted by ideological allies in the United
States and Britain, and so rapidly became extremely influential, then
dominant, then utterly dominant, in the Western architectural estab-
lishment, both among professional architects and among teachers. It
was not that a great deal of actually built architecture was modernist
in the 1930s and 1940s; it was that all the tastemakers decided, nearly
simultaneously, that the only type of architecture that was acceptable
to the elite was Modernist. Architects who objected were pilloried, cast
as bourgeois, marginalized, and sidelined. The 1930s also saw the rise to
international fame of the megalomaniac Frenchman Le Corbusier, that
Rasputin, who became the most successful propagandist for Modernism,
and established some of its most enduring dogmas, including divorc-
ing all buildings from their context and siting, and pretending a house
could be a “machine for living.”
This process continued, and even accelerated, after 1945, when actual
construction of Modernist buildings began to dominate. For the next
two decades, the cult resulted in the destruction of innumerable town
centers and the construction of endless shoddy and ugly buildings
totally unsuited for their claimed uses and unfitted for their sites, the
very opposite of their claimed “functionalism.” Modernism was never
popular among people in general, but their betters told them what
they needed. Without the eager cooperation of giant corporations,
though, Modernism would never have succeeded in lasting as long
or being as destructive. Part of this was ideological (similar to “woke”
corporate behavior today), through a successful propaganda cam-
paign to cast Modernist architecture as representative of “progress” and
“democracy,” part of it was the desire to make profits by participating
in industrial construction techniques (which, as Curl points out, were
actually mostly more expensive than the classic techniques replaced,
despite the claims of their proponents) and, as with General Motors, to
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destroy cities to make them better for cars. (For that latter, Curl covers
the famous revolt of Jane Jacobs against Robert Moses’s planned, and
partly completed, destruction of New York.) Anyone who disagreed
was ignored or destroyed.
Curl also spends some time on post-Modernism, a varied set of styles,
of which the two most prominent were, or are, Deconstructivism and
Parametricism. The former, as its name implies, is deformations of
Modernism, meant to provoke anxiety and unease among viewers and
users. The latter (of which London’s Shard is an example) is an attempt
to use computer algorithms to construct non-linear buildings, mostly
similarly disturbing but in a different way. “Deconstructivism and
Parametricism, by rejecting all that went before and failing to provide
clear values as replacements, can be seen as intentional aggression
on human senses, abusing perceptive mechanisms in order to gen-
erate unease, dislocation, and discomfort.” “Deconstructivism and
Parametricism induce a sense of dislocation both within buildings
and between buildings and their contexts. . . . By breaking continuity,
disturbing relationships between interior and exterior, and fracturing
connections between exterior and context, they undermine harmony,
gravitational control, and perceived stability, [which is] crucial to any
successful architecture.”
Now, I was curious what proponents of these post-modernist styles
say about them. Maybe sense is coming back into fashion. So I went and
read up what Patrik Schumacher, who named Parametricism in 2008
in a “Manifesto,” said. I knew we were in trouble when Schumacher
called his own style “profound.” Then he said tripe like “It cannot be
dismissed as eccentric signature work that only fits high-brow cultural
icons. Parametricism is able to deliver all the components for a high-
performance contemporary life process. All moments of contempo-
rary life become uniquely individuated within a continuous, ordered
texture.” Proponents of Deconstructivism say similar things. I wasn’t
surprised, though I was disappointed. It’s obvious that both styles are
merely the bastard children of Modernism, as can be seen by their use
of the ancient technique of obfuscation through cant.
What does Curl want to happen? He calls for a reworking of both
architectural education and the relationship of the public to architecture;
the public should no longer allow itself to be treated as acolytes to the
 The Worthy House 7

priests. “Architecture is far too important to be entrusted to the products

of talking-shops: as a public art, it matters hugely, and it cannot succeed
unless it connects with the public in a positive way, conveys meanings,
arouses resonances, reaches back to the past and forward to the future,
and has the appearance of stability.” Mostly, he wants a realization that
Modernism is awful. He wants the spell to be broken; he offers less of a
specific program than, like Puddleglum in C. S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair,
a stamping on the Witch’s enchanted fire and thereby recalling himself,
and his friends, to what was actually real and beautiful, as opposed to
the unreality the Witch was trying to sell them.
This is fine as far as it goes, but that’s not really far enough. We
should ponder what is the purpose of architecture, of buildings. As
Curl says, “Architecture is the one art form which plays an important
role in everyday existence.” It is frozen music. Destroy architecture and
you destroy a key component in binding a society together, through
its role in offering a common art and through that, a common culture.
“Without the ability to comprehend basic truths about morality and
beauty . . . humans are truly lost, adrift in a sea polluted with the flot-
sam and jetsam of discarded toys promoted by fashion, with nothing
to which they can hold fast. High culture has been suppressed, even
superseded, by advertising and the mass media. . . .” In other words,
architecture is the art that binds a society together. It is an antidote to
centrifugal forces, including those so common in the modern world,
whose destructive force is ever-building, yet tamped down by promises
of unbridled freedom and the fool’s gold of consumerism, for now.
Foundationalism, my own aborning political program, is really two
things: the renewal of society, or the rebuilding of a crumbled society,
and the long-term maintenance of that society, both along lines recog-
nizing reality, with a strong bias toward traditional Western knowledge
and modes of thought. No society can long exist, much less be a strong
society, without a unifying component of the spiritual, in a broader
sense than simply religious. Because, as I say, a coherent and uplifting
architecture is necessary for any successful society, architecture, the
right architecture, is the second of the pillars of Foundationalism (after
Space, which I discussed and explained recently).
The goal of architecture under Foundationalism will be a form of
emotional resonance, where all sectors and levels of society feel they
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have something in common that ties them together and which impels to
virtue. Since Foundationalism envisions a bound society, tied together by
many threads and wholly opposed to atomistic individualism, binding
forces are critical to its creation and maintenance. In Foundationalism,
architecture will not be a set of rigid beliefs, an aesthetic canon for the
elite, as is Modernism; it will instead, like governance, be an organic
new thing based on the wisdom of the past, intertwined with all the
people, high and low.
Pushing art as part of Foundationalism may seem odd for me, since
certainly I have little artistic or creative sense, and therefore cannot
knowledgeably discuss architecture or any other type of art. But I don’t
need to—that’s the advantage of hewing to classic architecture traditions,
that they can express any meaning desired, in a variety of languages, and
offer beauty and continuity, along with enough originality to prevent
seeming calcified. Foundationalism has no need to create anything that
is new, though some organically developing novelty is to be expected.
Oh, I am sure there is a great deal more that someone knowledgeable
can say about architecture as aesthetics, and how that matters to a
society. Roger Scruton has written a whole book on it (The Aesthetics of
Architecture) which I am sure it would be immensely profitable to read.
But a careful, philosophical parsing of architecture and society isn’t
what I’m after. I oppose instrumentalism as the lens for viewing human
beings; I am not so much opposed to instrumentalism in the works of
men’s hands. What I care about is the function architecture will play
under Foundationalism, and the implementation of that function.
The general type of high architecture necessary for this is entirely
clear. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch said in Three New Deals, “Scholars gradu-
ally recognized neoclassical monumentalism—whether of the 1930s,
the Renaissance, the French Revolution, or the Napoleonic empire—for
what it is: the architectural style in which the state visually manifests
power and authority.” Neoclassical monumentalism, let’s be honest,
impresses everybody. You are lying if you think Le Corbusier holds a
candle to, say, the Jefferson Memorial. True, there are limits to this. The
monstrous proportions of buildings proposed, but never built, by Hitler
and Stalin take this arc too far, becoming anti-human and enshrining the
state as a false god (the Amazon series The Man in the High Castle portrays
many of these buildings as if-built; this reality comes through clearly).
 The Worthy House 9

Any such program, especially one perceived as right-wing, therefore

has an uphill battle, since the gut reaction is that here is Albert Speer
reborn. But monumental classicism has a long history apart from the
regimes of the 1930s (which, as Curl points out, often approved of
Modernism, especially Mussolini’s Italy). And anyway, when my pro-
gram is being put into place, those who would complain the loudest
in that ideological vein will be picking sugar beets in Saskatchewan as
part of my rustication and lustration program for those who did the
most damage to our society.
Therefore, as far as high architecture controlled by the state,
Foundationalism will kill two birds with one stone—every ugly gov-
ernment building built since the 1940s will be torn down, and to the
extent new ones are needed, neoclassical buildings will go up. A lot fewer
will go up than are torn down, since there will be far fewer government
employees. The extra land will be given over to parks, or perhaps public
buildings tangential to government, such as libraries, which will also
be done in classical style. Since we will not be exalting government as
such, or government workers, we will not need giant new halls to act
as the focus for our rulers; most new buildings will be actual monu-
ments or multi-use, Roman Forum-type constructions. (There will be,
of course, government, and strong government. It will have limited
ends, though, even if unlimited means, and will not aspire to order
every aspect of daily life—far less than our current government does.)
And no private creation of any significant ugly building, Modernist or
other, will be permitted. Those that exist already will be torn down as
resources permit.
What of low architecture, that of daily life, of houses and workplaces?
There, too, forms of classical architecture will be strongly encouraged,
but the goal will be less monumentalism and more organic coherence
with how people actually live and work, combined with beauty and
the inspiration and joy in living that comes as a result. The government
will not mandate such architecture, as it will with high architecture, but
rather encourage it, through education and subsidy. Such encourage-
ment will take the form of only allowing government funding, and
student loans (if those still exist) for architectural schools that, at a
minimum, teach the execution of classic architecture as a priority. All
government contracts will only go to approved architecture, as will
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tax benefits for privately constructed buildings, which will, over time,
ensure that architects tend to gravitate to where the money is. The
Foundationalist state will seek ways to ensure that honor and prestige,
as well, accrue to architects of preferred styles. Moreover, given the
well-known association of the Left with Modernism (something Curl
spends a fair bit of time on, focusing on the nihilism and destructive-
ness common to both), since the Foundationalist state will, as its very
first act, utterly and permanently break the power of the Left, that alone
will clear the way for traditional architecture to rebound from the boot
that Modernism has placed on it for so many decades.
Other aspects will have to be worked out; this is not an ideology,
but a set of principles to use. (Prince Charles has recently put forth ten
principles that are a good place to start, in a December 2014 article
in The Architectural Review; he is pretty odious otherwise and not very
bright, but he has always been sensible on architecture). It is worth
noting that Foundationalism does not idolize agrarianism. The rural
life and culture has its place, and nature and its forms influence good
architecture, but high culture, and the drive to create a successful soci-
ety, always revolves around cities. Foundationalism strives to offer
a goal for, and outlet for, and inspiration for, human aspiration, and
rural life does not build spaceports (aside from today not occupying
the daily life of any significant percentage of the population). And the
Foundationalist state will take a similar approach to other art (though
a more restrained one, since architecture is the most important art for
the state), and we will return to the traditional approach where artists
work in cooperation with the pillars of society, state and private, rather
than being destructive agents of the Left as they mostly have been for
the past century (a topic I intend to discuss the whys and wherefores
of at some point, as it is not the natural order of things). And, at that
point, Making Dystopia will have accomplished the goals of its author,
and be merely a chronicle of an overly long, and overly destructive,
but fortunately vanished, period of architectural and societal distress.