1/25/2024 0 Comments Making a dystopia in venture townsIt’s true in science, health, in so many fields: wherever false narratives prevail, with the legacy media running interference for one side only in debates over facts and truth, local, state, national and international. It’s true in law enforcement from local police up to federal agencies – the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon – charged with protecting the public and the nation. Not only in architecture is this true, and in architectural education, but it’s true in education at all levels, K-Ph.D. In our day and age, miseducated elites regularly ram poorly conceived policies down the throats of their supposed beneficiaries. James Stevens Curl, author of “Making Dystopia,” “The Oxford Dictionary of Architecture,” and other scholarly treatments of architecture. As Salingaros points out, the architectural establishment has savaged the book, and it has not been read or commented on by elite practitioners in the field, who have ignored it. It is still possible, but it has not happened yet. It’s possible that James Stevens Curl’s book will launch that revolution. ![]() Some will dismiss that, but the eradication of beauty from the intensely visual field of architecture – the queen of the arts – which we all must experience every day and have done so since childhood, has had a major saddening effect on the world, and its reversal will bring about an efflorescence of happiness. ![]() It will rank with civilization’s victories in defeating totalitarianism and bringing democracy to Germany and Japan after WWII, and to Eastern Europe after the defeat of the Soviet Union in the Cold War. It will start a revolution in the way we shape our built environment, and the result will be as vital as the discovery by mankind that the natural environment is in equal peril. ![]() I once predicted in my review of the book on Amazon that if Dystopia got the attention it deserved, Salingaros asked himself the same question in “ Still Making Dystopia” and sadly concluded that evidence for the book’s impact on modernism must be considered elusive. Has Making Dystopia diminished the unwarrantedly high status of modernist architecture over those years? Undoubtedly it has. No wonder Stevens Curl won the 2019 Arthur Ross award for history and writing, bestowed by the New York chapter (and national headquarters) of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art. Stevens Curl in his book describes the result this way:Ī great language capable of infinite variety of expression, a mighty and expansive vocabulary, a vast resource based on two and a half millennia or more of civilization, was superseded by a series of monosyllabic grunts, foisted on the populace with a totalitarian disregard for the opinions of those who had not been drilled to conform. It was all a power-play, to drive humane architecture and its practitioners into the ground so that a new group of not very competent architects and academics could take over. Writing in The Critic a few months ago, the mathematician and architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros described the book this way:Ĭurl’s critique of the theory and practice of modernism demolished the economical-ethical-political arguments put forward for decades that justified forcing people to live in inhuman environments. ![]() Subtitled “The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism,” the book can only have been about modern architecture, perhaps the most curious and indeed outrageous phenomenon of our time. Three years have passed since British architectural historian James Stevens Curl’s masterful Making Dystopia was published by Oxford University Press. Photo: Out of Balance: From the jacket art for Making Dystopia. By David Brussat, Architecture Here and There, contributing writer
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