Yes to beautiful elegant buildings. Regrettably we live in a time where too few even recognise those qualities in anything. It’s the ugly and the grotesque, whether it’s in art or architecture, that are favoured.
7882 fremic
3 years ago
The London skyline, what a mess it is from the 1980s on. Outlandish is the architectural style, and it is only fun as novelty, and that is fleeting.
I could not agree more with Trump on this, Dignity, beauty, function, in classical Western architecture is what the Government should use.
Look at the Salford, Scottish, Cardiff, BBC Hq, terrible! Architecture is very political. No one but a Liberal/Lefty loon would have signed off on these White Elephants with silly interiors and concepts of use in ludicrous exteriors.
Although as the article points out most of the most famous historical buildings in Britain are not classical, from Westminster Abbey, to Westminster Palace and Windsor Castle or many of the most famous Gothic colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. Should these buildings be torn down and replaced with generic mock-Roman buildings?
Where they authentically express the living spiritual heights of their cultural moment they are art, …like Stonehenge, Winchester Cathedral. Parliament along with all the theme park fantasy kingdom (Tower of London, most of Windsor Castle, …) touristy kitsch should be razed.
The tower of London was built in the 13th century. It’s nice to know the man accusing others of being philistines wants to destroy the medieval fabric of the country.
And how is the classical architecture of Washington DC not touristy kitsch by this standard? It hardly seems to reflect ‘authenticity’ from what I saw there, unless you really believe the guff that the USA is somehow the Roman republic reborn – indeed Pugin saw it as the height of inauthenticity. The Palace of Westminster probably reflects British national spirit as much as the faux Roman columns reflect the fakeness and disloyalty of the Republic born in an act of narcissistic treachery to its rightful ruler – that is the USA.
I agree, Washington is offensive; but, it’s not Disneyworld kitsch (that’s Williamsburg). The Roman architecture too obviously affected the cultural power fetish of imperial Rome; the pantheon, mindless marble imposition on the credulous.
The masterpieces of Modern are such as I K Brunel’s bridges and Gustave Eifel’s cathedral tower -the spirit of Pascal, Newton, & co.. The NY skyscraper and the stalin-esque apartment towers express mass production, the tedious repetition of identical geometric forms, the crass pusillanimity of the bourgeois.
The archetypal trope of the Postmodern is probably the pixel, the cold dead end of Art.
The truly arrogant attitude typical of all too many architectural theorists and practitioners.. What about what we as the public might want..? Horrible tourists, I am a traveller….
Why? Hasn’t most architecture always been pastiche to some extent? Stone columns pretenidng to be wood etc etc.
One of the great fallacies of modernism, form follows function… and that’s it!?
1. I agree, that is a fallacy. Form & function are subsidiary functions, …along with climate, region, materials, craftsmen, etc. But for bourgeois culture the tyranny of function, money-making, obtains and destroys art, along with everything else worth the having.
2. Art in general always creates within and evolves out of its own tradition. Wooden structural elements were the precursors of stone columns and lintels, which in turn preceded iron and steel. And it is only “pretending” in the sense of “Transcending”, –raising the creation out of the flux of decay.
3. The “public” prefers football to symphonies. Low brow and high brow are both “the public”; but, sadly, the latter is overwhelmed by the oppressive monopoly of the former.
robert scheetz
3 years ago
Architecture, like everything else, is ideological. The cold, sterile, impersonal, outscale, utilitarian glass, steel and cement of bourgeois structures, deafeningly bespeaks naked power in all its brutal monstrosity, the phallic towers of power, however tour de force. Its political subsidiary is then only different in that it is ordered to express a mythical traditionalism. Both are repulsive philistinism.
In contrast, the contemporary zeitgeist is supremely ironic, almost a disappearing.
You’re talking Christianity, which was supremely the pre-modern ideology. Structurally, “religion” and “ideology”, express the same concept, –faith in a gospel, if you will.
Paul Hunt
3 years ago
I do like this article. I’m glad to see such honest reasoning in the person chairing BBBC. The language of buildings means that innovation has its place (There is plenty of beautiful brutalist and general modernist architecture) and so does classicism, they speak to us in certain ways and neo-classicism speaks to grandiosity that I believe most people would want in their landmark Government buildings. For every article by a talented architect decrying the Planning system for curtailing their freedom to create new forms, I think of the miserable tasteless pastiches of the type of work that they are supporting that has been dumped on the public realm on the cheap. I love a cartoon I read once which marks my view of designers – “Architect- “Our design respects principles of good place-making and respond to the street scene”, “Where’s the site?” “Architect – We have a few locations penciled in”. Don’t let constraints or public perception hamper you meeting your brief!
Yes to beautiful elegant buildings. Regrettably we live in a time where too few even recognise those qualities in anything.
It’s the ugly and the grotesque, whether it’s in art or architecture, that are favoured.
The London skyline, what a mess it is from the 1980s on. Outlandish is the architectural style, and it is only fun as novelty, and that is fleeting.
I could not agree more with Trump on this, Dignity, beauty, function, in classical Western architecture is what the Government should use.
Look at the Salford, Scottish, Cardiff, BBC Hq, terrible! Architecture is very political. No one but a Liberal/Lefty loon would have signed off on these White Elephants with silly interiors and concepts of use in ludicrous exteriors.
Although as the article points out most of the most famous historical buildings in Britain are not classical, from Westminster Abbey, to Westminster Palace and Windsor Castle or many of the most famous Gothic colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. Should these buildings be torn down and replaced with generic mock-Roman buildings?
Where they authentically express the living spiritual heights of their cultural moment they are art, …like Stonehenge, Winchester Cathedral. Parliament along with all the theme park fantasy kingdom (Tower of London, most of Windsor Castle, …) touristy kitsch should be razed.
The tower of London was built in the 13th century. It’s nice to know the man accusing others of being philistines wants to destroy the medieval fabric of the country.
And how is the classical architecture of Washington DC not touristy kitsch by this standard? It hardly seems to reflect ‘authenticity’ from what I saw there, unless you really believe the guff that the USA is somehow the Roman republic reborn – indeed Pugin saw it as the height of inauthenticity. The Palace of Westminster probably reflects British national spirit as much as the faux Roman columns reflect the fakeness and disloyalty of the Republic born in an act of narcissistic treachery to its rightful ruler – that is the USA.
I agree, Washington is offensive; but, it’s not Disneyworld kitsch (that’s Williamsburg). The Roman architecture too obviously affected the cultural power fetish of imperial Rome; the pantheon, mindless marble imposition on the credulous.
The masterpieces of Modern are such as I K Brunel’s bridges and Gustave Eifel’s cathedral tower -the spirit of Pascal, Newton, & co.. The NY skyscraper and the stalin-esque apartment towers express mass production, the tedious repetition of identical geometric forms, the crass pusillanimity of the bourgeois.
The archetypal trope of the Postmodern is probably the pixel, the cold dead end of Art.
The truly arrogant attitude typical of all too many architectural theorists and practitioners.. What about what we as the public might want..? Horrible tourists, I am a traveller….
Why? Hasn’t most architecture always been pastiche to some extent? Stone columns pretenidng to be wood etc etc.
One of the great fallacies of modernism, form follows function… and that’s it!?
1. I agree, that is a fallacy. Form & function are subsidiary functions, …along with climate, region, materials, craftsmen, etc. But for bourgeois culture the tyranny of function, money-making, obtains and destroys art, along with everything else worth the having.
2. Art in general always creates within and evolves out of its own tradition. Wooden structural elements were the precursors of stone columns and lintels, which in turn preceded iron and steel. And it is only “pretending” in the sense of “Transcending”, –raising the creation out of the flux of decay.
3. The “public” prefers football to symphonies.
Low brow and high brow are both “the public”; but, sadly, the latter is overwhelmed by the oppressive monopoly of the former.
Architecture, like everything else, is ideological. The cold, sterile, impersonal, outscale, utilitarian glass, steel and cement of bourgeois structures, deafeningly bespeaks naked power in all its brutal monstrosity, the phallic towers of power, however tour de force. Its political subsidiary is then only different in that it is ordered to express a mythical traditionalism. Both are repulsive philistinism.
In contrast, the contemporary zeitgeist is supremely ironic, almost a disappearing.
“Architecture, like everything else, is ideological”
No, it is not…
Love, friendship, courage…?
You’re talking Christianity, which was supremely the pre-modern ideology. Structurally, “religion” and “ideology”, express the same concept, –faith in a gospel, if you will.
I do like this article. I’m glad to see such honest reasoning in the person chairing BBBC. The language of buildings means that innovation has its place (There is plenty of beautiful brutalist and general modernist architecture) and so does classicism, they speak to us in certain ways and neo-classicism speaks to grandiosity that I believe most people would want in their landmark Government buildings.
For every article by a talented architect decrying the Planning system for curtailing their freedom to create new forms, I think of the miserable tasteless pastiches of the type of work that they are supporting that has been dumped on the public realm on the cheap. I love a cartoon I read once which marks my view of designers – “Architect- “Our design respects principles of good place-making and respond to the street scene”, “Where’s the site?” “Architect – We have a few locations penciled in”. Don’t let constraints or public perception hamper you meeting your brief!