A Vision of Britain: a Personal View of Architecture. - book reviews

National Review, Dec 22, 1989 by James Gardner

There is a peculiar political dimension to all of this. Occasionally, in the course of his discussion, the Prince will, innocently enough, use the word "code." This is highly interesting, because that word has entered the language of art through the language of deconstructionism-a philosophy of distinctly radical proclivities. In this connection it reflects the influence of one of Charles's principal advisors in architectural matters, Leon Krier, a rabid post-modernist bent on bulldozing away the modernist heritage and erecting in its place entire cities according to his own nebulously stated conceptions of beauty. In England modernism is still seen as a risky and radical commodity, which is why many on the Left continue to embrace it, and why many on the Right, in their fervent wish to be pre-modern, end up by being post-modern (notwithstanding Charles's rejection of this term).

Among American critics, on the other hand, conservatism is leagued with modernism, defending formal integrity against the meretricious intrusions of ornament and extra-architectural considerations. In America, however, you would never find a debate like the one at the Victoria and Albert last month. On this side of the Atlantic most architects defected long ago from mainstream modernism, and now embrace post-modernism in varying degrees. This transition has been viewed with dismay by the American cultural Right. It has been seen as, and indeed it is, an apostasy from the pursuit of the purer beauties of architecture.

But the cultural Right's anathematizing of all, or almost all, architects who do not toe the modernist line is probably the weakest link in its armor. The cultural Right has refused intransigently to acknowledge that, despite certain monuments of surpassing beauty, the modernist idiom has proved inadequate to the needs of living, breathing, aspiring humanity. The originators of the style hoped to evolve an idiom so timeless that it could never grow old. In fact, it has aged much faster than anyone could have foreseen: much faster, as it has turned out, than pre-modern buildings, sincethere is no place in such structures for age, and time, whose sea-changes beautify so many of man's artifacts, can only ravage a modern building. As filth darkens each nook and cranny, as the structure starts to creak, the modernist dream of immaculate pristineness seems hollow indeed. All of those buildings, all of those proud towers, are slated for destruction. So cheaply are most of them made, and so tenuous are their structural principles, that few will survive more than two or three generations. By then, if they have not been pulled down, they will come down of their own weakness. The older buildings will remain standing. In the meantime, communications and a changing world may very well abolish those conditions that necessitated the dense concentration of people into highrises. The twenty-first century will probably look more like the nineteenth century than like the twentieth.