Absurdity is nothing new in human affairs, but it seems to be increasingly predominant in Western society since the vast expansion of tertiary education. Frequently one does not know whether to sit down because of the dangers posed by helpless laughter, or to climb up to the roof in order to throw oneself off. Horace Walpole said that life is a tragedy ...
There was a very curious letter to the editor in the latest edition of the English monthly magazine The Critic. It was from a correspondent who defended the type of architecture known as brutalist, that is to say of buildings ...
Recently, it seems to me, there has been a concerted effort, amounting almost to a propaganda campaign, to persuade people that the brutalist strain in architecture was and is a glorious episode in architectural history. This campaign ...
The monstrous regiment of modernists was so quick off the mark with their hideous, egomaniacal plans to rebuild the roof of Notre-Dame—one could not call any of their proposals a restoration—that I began to suspect that the fire ...
It is said that Ivan the Terrible ordered that the principal architect of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow should have his eyes put out so that he could never again build anything as beautiful. Whether or not this story is apocryphal ...
Nearly three quarters of a century after his death, Hitler’s shadow continues to fall across Europe. Any dissent from any modern orthodoxy, no matter how silly, soon meets with the argumentum ad Hitlerum, to the effect that something ...
Of all Western European countries, England is the most richly endowed with unutterably dismal towns and cities, in part the heritage of the Industrial Revolution and in part that of modern architects and town planners. I once wrote of ...
No one can build a decent palace anymore. I agree that this is not one of the greatest social problems of our time, but it must nevertheless be revelatory of something economic or cultural. My first reaction when seeing President ...
Returning recently to France from Germany, where I had given a talk on the ideological roots of ugliness (which might seem to some a rather peculiar and even inexistent subject), I was struck once again by the sheer inhuman hideousness ...
With Iron Man 3 hauling in $174 million at the box office last weekend, this is a good time to pay tribute to a great architect whose hold on the American imagination is finally getting the respect it deserves: John Lautner. No matter ...
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