Why Do We Continue to See Modernist Buildings Being Built?
By Dom Nozzi
Several decades ago, the architecture profession was infected by the Modernism virus.
That infection strongly persists everywhere in the US, and remains firmly in place to this very day.
It is a sick, twisted, absurd, politicized building design ideology that elevates design "innovation" over all else.
Timeless beauty has been tossed in the wastebasket. Beauty has been disparaged as being "subjective" (which, by the way, is complete nonsense – it is now well-established that humans are hard-wired have a number of building design preferences).
Part of the modernist campaign to make our buildings ugly is to make the insane claim that ornamentation is somehow criminal, authoritarian and elitist – which is more pure nonsense. Survey after survey shows that nearly all of us despise the ugly character of modernist buildings -- buildings that thoroughly destroy any sense of civic pride.
Tragically, British, American, French, and other armed forces obliterated a huge amount of gorgeous medieval architecture in Europe in WWII -- architecture which was almost entirely replaced with awful modernism. This is one of the greatest losses of architecture in human history and is largely irreplaceable.
Modernism is a recipe for societal decline and the extreme uglification of our cities. Given how much we need citizens to live in town centers, and how many have instead come to fear centers due to safety concerns, the last thing we need to do is to make town centers more ugly.
There are a few tiny, tragic benefits associated with modernism: So many people hate it that it will be in lower demand and therefore more affordable after it is built. Modernism will also create a large number of demolition jobs in the future, as nearly all modernist buildings will soon be demolished because of how despised and dysfunctional they are.
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