Alexandra Road, London

Source: Bigstock

When a country is intent on committing suicide, as is Britain, it celebrates the very things that have led, or are leading, to its demise. Whether this is because it thinks it no longer has a right to exist and the world would be better off without it, or whether it is because, when something appears inevitable to us, we welcome it to disguise our impotence to halt it, I do not know. But the fact is that London is about to have a museum devoted to the kind of architecture that has turned so much of Britain’s urban landscape into a visual nightmare, a scouring of the retina.

I have long suspected, but cannot prove with an indisputable argument, that this architecture has played its part in the brutalization of daily life and social behavior in the country. Certainly, it has dehumanized the appearance of many towns and cities; its harsh surfaces and willfully austere and jagged designs leave the mere human being feeling that he is about as welcome as an ant on a kitchen counter—which, indeed, he now much resembles.

This architecture is to architects what propaganda was to communist leaders: It serves to make them feel powerful, not despite the fact that so many people detest it, but because so many people detest it. They are like the doctors of old, who, if they could not cure their patients, could at least make them take the most repellent and noxious medicine, on the grounds that a little bit of what revolts you does you good.

“People who do not see or value beauty are unlikely to be much disturbed by ugliness.”

The projected museum is in a former school in the north of London, designed in 1968. Here is fairly typical commentary on the building:

Despite decades of wear and some unfortunate interventions, the raw concrete structure has remained a cherished example of socially driven modernist design.

It is to be noticed that the cherishing done here is independent of anyone who cherishes; as for “socially driven modernist design,” we might read “totalitarian.” Indeed, the building exudes totalitarianism, as raw reinforced concrete exudes ghastly stains after a short time.

Le Corbusier, one of the founders of this kind of architecture, was indeed a fascist in the most literal sense, though he had no real objection to communist totalitarianism, either. What he most hated was what he called the street, that is to say the place where people behave spontaneously and without direction from above, and where they are not corralled into functions imposed on them by all-wise socially driven architects. It was for this reason that he and his acolytes preferred to build urban wildernesses of the kind that have now been built the world over, but especially in Britain.

The architects who have been given the task of renewing the school building where the museum dedicated to architectural brutalism is to be housed have “noted its distinct geometry, as well as its symbolic presence reflecting the ideals of the school’s broader 1960s Brutalist architecture conceived in an era of social progress.”

Apologists for such architecture write a pure Soviet langue de bois—or perhaps I should say langue de béton, since concrete rather than wood is their favorite material:

Consultation with the school, families and local stakeholders has underpinned the project from the outset, ensuring that the building’s next chapter remains tied to its founding ethos centered on architecture as a tool for collective learning and expression.

Does anyone, after the death of the late, not much lamented, Leonid Brezhnev, have thoughts that correspond to, or are couched in, words such as these? By their language shall ye know them.

As usual, there is no reference in the commentary that I have cited to the aesthetic quality of the building or the style in which it is being built. Beauty is not even given the dignity by the author of an extra available on a model of a car, of something desirable to be added; it is not a desideratum at all for such writers on architecture, who are to modernist architects what praise singers once were to African chiefs. The nearest such people can come to aesthetic judgment is in phrases such as “distinct geometry,” as if distinctness of geometry (in all probability not very distinct) could by itself confer value on a building.

Here we catch a glimpse of the terrible doctrine of originality as a good in itself irrespective of what is created by it. A building constructed of frozen butter would be original, and no doubt distinctive, and with the expenditure of sufficient effort could probably be built; but its originality and distinctness would not add one jot or title to its worth. But it would find its defenders. After all, was butter not the opposite of guns in the imagination of such as Goering and Goebbels, and therefore a building of butter would be a symbol of ideological commitment to the comfort and welfare of the general, in fact a prime example of “architecture conceived in an era of social progress”?

At no point, as far as I can recall, have architects, or their ideological hangers-on, issued an apology for the destruction they have wrought and the ugliness they have created. Perhaps they have different vision from that of ordinary people (there is evidence to suggest as much after students of architecture have undergone profound indoctrination in schools of architecture), but in any case, people who do not see or value beauty are unlikely to be much disturbed by ugliness. They look at buildings and see social progress the way that environmentalists look at steel windmills in a landscape and see reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.

But the desire for beauty is something that has almost to be beaten out of people. It is all but instinctive. One way to do it is to ensure that they never have any access to beauty from an early age and therefore cannot miss it. The Industrial Revolution no doubt did this to the first generations of its workers, but now there is no excuse for doing so, though it is the implicit goal of most architects, especially the leaders of the profession. That is why they cannot leave a townscape unscathed but must mark it like a dog marks a tree. They hope for a population that can look at a raw concrete wall and see in it nothing but social progress.

Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book is On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press).