Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism

by James Stevens Curl

In Making Dystopia , distinguished architectural historian James Stevens Curl tells the story of the advent of architectural Modernism in the aftermath of the First World War, its protagonists, and its astonishing, almost global acceptance after 1945. He argues forcefully that the triumph of
architectural Modernism in the second half of the twentieth century led to massive destruction, the creation of alien urban landscapes, and a huge waste of resources. Moreover, the coming of Modernism was not an inevitable, seamless evolution, as many have insisted, but a massive, unparalled
disruption that demanded a clean slate and the elimination of all ornament, decoration, and choice.

Tracing the effects of the Modernist revolution in architecture to the present, Stevens Curl argues that, with each passing year, so-called "iconic" architecture by supposed "star" architects has become more and more bizarre, unsettling, and expensive, ignoring established contexts and proving to be
stratospherically remote from the aspirations and needs of humanity. In the elite world of contemporary architecture, form increasingly follows finance, and in a society in which the 'haves' have more and more, and the "have-nots"are ever more marginalized, he warns that contemporary architecture
continues to stack up huge potential problems for the future, as housing costs spiral out of control, resources are squandered on architectural bling, and society fractures.

This courageous, passionate, deeply researched, and profoundly argued book should be read by everyone concerned with what is around us. Its combative critique of the entire Modernist architectural project and its apologists will be highly controversial to many. But it contains salutary warnings that
we ignore at our peril. And it asks awkward questions to which answers are long overdue.

Genres: Architecture, Nonfiction, History, Art, Cultural, 21st Century

592 pages, Hardcover

Published October 23, 2018

About the author

Born in Ireland, where he received his early education, Professor Emeritus James Stevens Curl has held Chairs in Architectural History at two British Universities. Having graduated in Architecture at Oxford, he went on to study Town Planning, and wrote his Dissertation under the direction of the German architect, Arthur Korn. He later read for his Doctorate at University College London, and has twice been Visiting Fellow at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge. He is a Member of The Royal Irish Academy, a Fellow of the Societies of Antiquaries of London and of Scotland, an Architect Accredited in Building Conservation, a member of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland, a Fellow of the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland and a Member of the Royal Institute of British Architects . He worked for a number of years as an architect, with an especial interest in historic buildings and conservation, until he became a full-time academic in 1978, having already published perceptive articles and books which began to establish his reputation for impeccable scholarship, a fine prose-style, and penetrating insights.

Reviews

[Charles Haywood · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 photographs, 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 references 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 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 limitations. 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 tradition, 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 swallowed 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 inhuman, 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 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, standing 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 literature 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 published 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 wishful 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 immediately 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 by Walter Gropius under government aegis. Nominally apolitical, the Bauhaus was in fact a den of radical politics (liberally larded with nuttiness), 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 thinking, 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 building. 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 architects 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 further 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 Nazis were not nearly as opposed to Modernist architecture as is often suggested—they were “ambivalent,” being most definitely not conservatives, but revolutionaries, and therefore attracted to certain of the ideological underpinnings 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 establishment, 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 divorcing 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 campaign 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 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 generate 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 contemporary 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.

[Review completes as first comment.]

[Christopher McIntosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

All my life I have heard people complaining repeatedly about what architects and town planners habitually do to our towns and cities - familiar districts razed to make way for soulless shopping "precincts", friendly neighbourhoods replaced by concrete wastelands that pass for housing projects, fine-grained streets violated by the insertion of monstrous "iconic" buildings that win prizes and boost the egos of the architects but soon look run-down, tawdry and dated. I rarely hear anyone praise these atrocities, but whever someone protests against them they are ignored, shouted down or ridiculed by the architectural establishment. Typical is the way in which that establishment has poured scorn on H. R. H. the Prince of Wales for his efforts to promote an architecture that is harmonious, human and respectful of tradition. Fortunately Prince Charles is not alone in his campaign. Among his kindred spirits is the author of this excellent book, the distinguished architectural expert and historian James Stevens Curl.
The fact that someone of Curl's prominence should launch an attack on the modernist dystopia has unsettled and enraged the acolytes of the modernist cult. The venomous way in which they have attacked the book reveals that there is much more to this issue than just a difference of taste in matters of style. What we are dealing with here is a profound clash of world views: on the one hand a view that respects tradition, continuity with the past and the importance of beauty for the human soul; on the other hand a school of thought that scorns tradition, wishes to break with the past, and has banished even the concepts of beauty and the soul from its vocabulary.
Prof. Curl traces the history of dystopian modernism from its origins in the early 20th century up to the present day, giving numerous examples of its horrendous consequences. But Curl's book is not merely a lament. In the Epilogue he makes some important suggestions for reforming the syllabus in schools of architecture so as to lay the basis for a better built environment in the future. It is to be hoped that his message will be heeded, as much is at stake here for the future of our civilisation.

[Myllena Melo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is really a book you might wanna read just for the sake of allowing your intellect to read something completely out of the mainstream of architecture. Not very popular opinions are inside this volume, although, through analyzing the narrative and the primary fonts that Mr Curl gathers in here, I realized that he's far more right in his argument than I wish he'd be.

He goes from the supposed to be "Pioneers" as nominated by Persvner to Le Corbusier and many other masterminds from Modern movement and debunks many fallacies that we, as architects, believe and repeat without critical thinking, since the aftermath of the first world war, where there's a complete split with tradition. He speaks coherently and factually about the philosophy behind this rupture and the cultural products of it, "The age of the Spectacle " which reminded me of a very good book called "Competing Spectacles" by Tony Reinke.

He also makes some assertions about traditional architecture and what he considers as "good architecture" as a by-product of a higher culture (an art) and religious endeavour, humility and penitence (on acquire the skills, culture and mindset alone, after leaving the modernist compounds at university campuses) that points us to beauty, to order, to something far above and greater than us.

He also sheds some light on teaching methods to architecture faculties/universities/officers.

This is really a very helpful book if you're open-minded to different arguments than the ones inculcated into our minds at Architecture School through the years of apprenticeship.

What troubled me reading this book tho was the textual formatting. I wish the footnotes were on the same pages that it is mentioned. Unfortunately (also, fortunately), there are so many footnotes that are impossible to do the text formatting to fit in one page only. Also, the book is a bit repetitive with words, expressions...which makes boring to read and to check all the notes at the same time.

If you're really up to read something different in Architecture, this is your book for now. Before that, I was really tired of reading the same opinions everywhere. It is hard to get your mind to think critically when the narratives are the same everywhere....it's disheartening, actually. I don't agree 100% with which is said in this book, but, I have to agree that we've been far too long indoctrinated with this poisonous and divisive worldview from the modern movement that is still around us everywhere and in the built environment - especially in my Brazilian context, where we already live in the dystopia described by Mr Curl. It's a sad thing to say, but it is true.

[Rudy M · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book of contemporary architectural history I have read so far. Anyone wanting to understand architecture must read it.

[Eric Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing intellectual feast, this book provides a provocatively honest look at the history, and the historiography, of architecural modernism. More than that, it is a book full of regret about the consequences of modern architecture and the alienation it has fostered around the globe. Beyond the narrow confines of architectural history, if you are interested in the relationship between architecture and culture, or want a deeper understanding of how human creativity can remake the world for better, or worse, read this book!

[David Bisset · Rating 5 out of 5]

I agree with his critique of Modernism. It has disastrous consequences for townscape and was unbelievably dictatorial. Not everything was built in this style and some examples are of considerable interest. James Curl makes a powerful case, but he is unnecessarily prolix. Still this book is needed refutation of a dystopic philosophy.

[Benji Visser · Rating 2 out of 5]

I couldn't stand the writing style. The author seems to have been thoroughly institutionalized, and the writing shows it.