The smugness and the superiority we felt when proposing to normie clients terraced roofs. As if we knew some secret from the future and were willing to share it with the plebs. And each time the client stuck to its pitched roof, felt like a defeat. Soon I learned to follow the client more, but then felt like losing the whole purpose of enlightening the masses.
The CAD didn't help much, au contraire, the easiness of copying and pasting, and the difficultness of drawing anything but simple geometry made it so "everybody" could do it. Much like LLM's now, the CADs seemed to stealthily facilitate the dumbing down. I for one felt for the whole minimalist trend out of comfort ultimately. Expediency. Efficiency.
I then felt like everybody should have been given the tools to design for himself. Small projects to be excused of not hiring an architect. Democratization. For a supposed return to the vernacular. But apparently once the virus of modernity has been deployed, you can't unbake the cake. No more vernacular as we understood it, built on solid foundations. The new vernacular is just mutants of modernity. So everybody can design anything and nobody apparently really can.
With regards to the supposed return to vernacular, I still think it's completely achievable. First, when they self-build, people tend to favour human scales; even if the houses still look like misshapen mutants with Aircon entrails and pink plaster pecked by pigeons, they could be very easily overhauled and turned into something cohesive by, say, a master planner.
People also plant gardens and leave room for trees.
There are two challenges:
a. complete reliance on industrial materials is a challenge in itself. This is Modernism's hidden power level.
b. the general public has terrible tastes. This is true to some extent, and could be easily solved if elites promoted wholesome values instead of consumerist slop, TikTok brain rot and a superficial parroting of 'Western' values.
The trouble with "people" is that few afford to really build something on their own, so most rely on the private entities replacing the communist state in the role of builder for the masses. Virtually all new suburbs lack that needed cohesive master planning, so it's almost worst than vernacular medieval towns (plumbing and electricity make up for the rest of the faults). I think what those medieval towns had and new neighborhoods are lacking is not achievable through master planning. They achieved it organically, and now we don't have that time unfortunately. The speed called for the planning and it's not going to slow down by itself.
As for the tastes, the public always had the poorest taste, but it didn't mater much. We maybe romanticize the old country styles, but I think they built like they built forced by the lack of your "point a. challenge". It's all they could afford, and all they had the knowhow. Expanding the limits of possibilities invites.. let's say.. the "surprise factor". You never know what you're going to get.
This trajectory maps on every kind of human endeavor that has been 'democratized'. Once the stones are ground into pebbles and then sand.. it's hard to put them back together. To keep with the analogy.. a way out might be to come up with a new type of concrete using all the sand. Connecting the dots. Coalesce. Maybe. But we've already seen what the modernists used all the new concrete for. Fingers crossed.
First I should catch up with your past articles, you put into words many of my "feels". I'm glad I found your ss.
I stopped "architecturing" also because I didn't see any way out of this conundrum. I'm now out of the loop for many years. A bit rusty. And I've never been the theorycel, anyway. But my first thought is any revival should start from above. So "the elites" would be the ones who have to be "tradpunkpilled". I think you are up to a good start here.
I also think that some of us will ride the tiger just by living according to "the principles". Maybe that will lead to communities, maybe not. The best bet is to keep alive the ideals. To quote (supposedly) Gustav Mahler, "Tradition is not the worship of ashes but preservation of fire"
I completely sympathise with everything you've described. I was even guilty of the elitist smugness architects indulge in.
It's funny that about a year ago I was scrolling through my facebook feed and stumbled across an acid post from one of my tutors (an otherwise based TradOrtho and a polymath) who was mocking some estate agent for publishing an article on architectural styles, allowing the public to decide which ones they preferred.
My former tutor replied that the term 'style' has been rendered useless and is now passe. This was followed by a wave of seal clapping from various Millenial architects, sharing sarcastic encounters where their dumb clients demanded absurd things from them, or weren't cultured enough. The emperor has no clothes, yet all these midwits feel the need to be pedantic about the plebs' lack of education.
Brasilia is a good example of the results of modernism. The town is hostile towards pedestrians and the buildings are hostile to humans. Walking in niemeyer's buildings is a physical and psychological ordeal, the white cement reflects light and heat from all angles, its like being inside a solar oven, trees are non existent and shadow is rare. The inside of the buildings aren't better, the huge windows let too much sun and heat to penetrate, so they need to tint the windows with strong shading to make the space minimally habitable.
I can imagine. I think someone told me that planners didn't stick to Niemeyer's initial street layout and started building a completely different street grid. Is this the case, or am I mixing stories?
Of course you will have likely read Tom Wolfe’s book From Bauhaus to Our House which makes the Modernist Dream look pretty shaky.
But have you considered, are you adequately prepared to address a counterattack, involving the suggestion that classical architecture is one embodiment of classical ideas of beauty, but that there might be others?
You might have heard the famous quotation attributed to Plato…
"I do not mean by beauty of form such beauty as that of animals or pictures, which the many would suppose to be my meaning; but, says the argument, understand me to mean straight lines and circles, and the plane or solid figures which are formed out of them by turning-lathes and rulers and measurers of angles; for these I affirm to be not only relatively beautiful, like other things, but they are eternally and absolutely beautiful..."
…which, says the argument, might be a description of the Barcelona Pavilion, Lever House, or indeed Villa Savoye.
If the classical notions of beauty and proportion informing classical architecture are based around geometry, well, can’t it can be seen and appreciated with much greater clarity in Modern buildings?
Thanks for sharing the Plato quote. If I understand correctly, some architects use it to make the case that Modernist minimalism is aesthetically justified because it most clearly embodies Euclidean geometry.
I don't think Classicism was less Euclidean than the International Style. In fact, everything from Romanesque, Gothic, to 19th century Eclecticism relied on pure Euclidean geometry. Decoration is included here. There was no knowledge of complexity theory, non-linear equations, fractals, attractors etc. before mid 20th century.
Now in pre-Modern architecture, pure geometric shapes coexisted with organic complexity. Every edifice was decorated in Greek orders, their facades and interiors were symmetrical, had clear compositional axes; yet this did not inhibit cities to develop organically, following the shapes of hills, offering a wide array of vernacular buildings with varying heights, using local building materials and mimicking shapes seen in nature.
In Modernity anything organic was vehemently rejected and deemed unacceptable, so the Euclidean shapes were magnified and turned into an empty glorification of industry and technical prowess.
Now it's funny that Modernism's successors hated this clinical simplicity and rebelled against it themselves; what is Postmodernism anything other than a rebelious teen mocking his dad? What is contemporary Tectonism, from Zaha Hadid to Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Peter Eisenmann, Thomas Heatherwick - anything other than a total rejection of Euclidean geometry in favour of non-Euclidean parametricism? This whole 'biophilia' craze.
It's what Modernity does - splitting a coherent whole and turning it into polar opposites, which then start warring among themselves, struggling for total dominance.
This is how Carl Jung defines enantiodromia, by the way.
I think we can leave things there, as we have now left architecture proper and have entered political philosophy where we might just disagree, as you might find me much friendlier to human liberty, private property, freedom of conscience, freedom of exchange, market capitalism.
So yeah, you may write me off as a rootless cosmopolitan. 🤷♂️
Sure thing; it's always great when we can discuss things politely. I'm not writing you off. I noticed libertarians are quite open to discussion and not very quick in cancelling those they disagree with.
As a student I used to like the Barcelona Pavilion too, but only because I was told it's nice. Cheers ;)
Certainly I appreciate your eloquent, erudite reply!
The answer for the postmodernist darlings’ collective teenage rebellion is they need to quit!
Yes, Modernism c. 1970 was too tight a straitjacket, excluding anything sensuous, sculptural, shunning even interesting variations like the Streamline Moderne.
Modernist canons of acceptability needed to be broadened, but nobody asked for a complete overturn of every sort of ideal. Indeed didn’t Michael Graves only get his monstrous jukebox [The Portland Building] built only by being the lowest bidder in a government contract? Something like that.
So I don’t blame Modernism as such for PoMo aesthetic violations, their sins are their own
Fair enough. I'd almost be willing to accept the idea that Modernist canons should be broadened, but this leads to another question: what is the valuable essence of Modernism that needs to be preserved?
If by 'Modernism' we simply mean an austere aesthetic that can adapt to contemporary industrial materials, this can work. Many austere styles looked great - Dorian Greek, Perpendicular Gothic, Art Deco.
If the true essence of Modernism consists of the five principles of Le Corbusier (and very similar ones from Bauhaus and Mies), than those principles are simply a pure negation of ancient metaphysics and aesthetics. They're a replacement of a sacramental vision with a technocratic one.
I think one should start from the Cosmic Law, seeing architecture as a reflection of it, and then adapting new means of construction to keep them true to this sacramental vision.
If it's possible to maintain aspects of Modernism while completely divorcing them from the subversive core ideology, then we should be ready to compromise.
Also fair. By “Art Deco” you may mean the pure spare lines, curves of Art Moderne, the Streamline style I was praising earlier. Because Deco is not particularly austere but rather pretty florid, with all manner of fountains and sunbursts and Egyptian influences.
The Modernist argument for the skyscraper is that masonry will only carry loads up to maybe ten storeys. To go higher the weight of the building will need to be carried on steel beams. So the walls are now freed up, they can be anything, including glass.
So yes, you could enclose the beams with 13th century stone and pediments and the rest of it, or you can make a fresh statement.
If that statement honours the canons of proportion, symmetry etc I’m fine with glassfibre panels and glass
Well the issue with skyscrapers, in my view, is deeper than their quantitative merit and its structural justification. In aesthetic and social terms, I think the concept of 'gentle density' warrants against relying on them extensively.
In broader terms, 'Skyscrapers' presuppose an entire set of premises that are not directly linked with architecture. All past civilisations built monumental structures, yet none of them had this utilitarian, 'line go up' function.
I won't write an essay about it; I'll just say I find authors like Neil Postman, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Patrick Deneen, even uncle Ted - to provide a deeper critique of the issues of modernity.
The merits of this critique lie in the fact that they're not just demands for abstract rights, absolute freedom/equality or some Utopian manifesto. They are rooted in Western culture and its institutions.
This one's by a *socialist*, who has basically the same tastes as you. He even includes some non-Western examples, suggesting this is just the way people are.
Thanks for sharing; I read half of it and I think I'll go on a rant here; might turn it into a post at some point.
First, it's undeniable that a society led by the merchant mindset leads to a slow erosion of aesthetics. A concern for people's wellbeing is obviously justified.
This being said, the issue I have with socialists is they force themselves to view history through the most narrow lens possible.
"Handcrafts and ornament are not bourgeois, they are democratic". Brilliant. Now take a breath that you established that. Every Medieval, Ancient or archaic sculptor patted himself on the back after finishing a statue, saying 'today's been a great day for democracy!'
The biggest blind spot in socialists' mentality is the same blind spot libertarians have - attempting to reduce everything to utility (basic human needs) and thus, the primacy of economics. The first group want everything to express the democratic will of the people, the second want to express individual liberty. Both groups need a good dose of psychedelics (not that I endorse it).
Not all human needs are created equal. Even a reductionist thinker like Maslow proposed a hierarchy of needs, which become less primal (economic) the closer we get to the pyramid's top. But a much better classification was given by Scheler and, more recently, Iain McGilchrist.
I. Sacred: connectedness of all things
II. Wisdom: justice, beauty, truth, learning
III. Virtue: courage, loyalty, teamwork, humility, prudence, compassion
IV. Utility: usefulness for satisfying basic needs & wants
According to the scholar and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, our minds are capable of two fundamentally different ways of interacting with the world. The right hemisphere of the brain builds on lower-order values to embrace higher-order values, all of which require affective or moral engagement with the world. The left hemisphere tends to dismiss higher-order values in favour of lower-order ones; it either reduces everything to its utility value or rejects it vehemently.
McGilchrist then proves that lower level values only have meaning when they are reliant on upper level ones. Utility cannot be pursued for its own sake, as the 'paradox of hedonism proves'; it needs to be anchored in virtues, which in turn need to be anchored in wisdom etc.
This understanding of values (which Iain calls 'right-hemispheric and which corresponds with every pre-modern metaphysical system) is the only one that can preserve beauty.
Returning to the article in the link, the tendency to reduce everything to utility becomes obvious. In several parts it reduces aesthetic fulfilment to mental wellbeing ("People trammeled in on all sides by ugliness are often unhappy without even knowing why").
Democracy as the highest conceivable ideal is another example of a lower order value aiming to reduce everything to itself. Why is 'the will of the people' supreme? Is there some objective or divine force that only manifests through plurality? Is there something akin to Divine creation that only happens through emergent bottom-up phenomena, and never top-down? This is obviously not the case, as most surviving historical monuments from all cultures had patrons that were either kings, aristocrats or bourgeois.
If the will of the people is sacred because of some divine zeitgeist that manifests through time, what about all the instances where people vote for things that lead to sickness or destruction? What if the people unanimously vote in favour of legalising opioids or frying their brains on TikTok?
What about the will of the people who decide to submit themselves to God, heteronormativity or some dynasty of kings? Is that collective will all of a sudden not divine, but demonic?
"But let’s leave aside God’s glory—what about ordinary human happiness? One of the most infuriating aspects of contemporary architecture is its willful disdain for democracy."
No, let's not. This particular reductionist mindset (in this case, reducing the Sacred (I) to human pleasure (IV) is what leads to the destruction of beauty.
Other than these issues, I agree with most of the things laid out in the link.
The smugness and the superiority we felt when proposing to normie clients terraced roofs. As if we knew some secret from the future and were willing to share it with the plebs. And each time the client stuck to its pitched roof, felt like a defeat. Soon I learned to follow the client more, but then felt like losing the whole purpose of enlightening the masses.
The CAD didn't help much, au contraire, the easiness of copying and pasting, and the difficultness of drawing anything but simple geometry made it so "everybody" could do it. Much like LLM's now, the CADs seemed to stealthily facilitate the dumbing down. I for one felt for the whole minimalist trend out of comfort ultimately. Expediency. Efficiency.
I then felt like everybody should have been given the tools to design for himself. Small projects to be excused of not hiring an architect. Democratization. For a supposed return to the vernacular. But apparently once the virus of modernity has been deployed, you can't unbake the cake. No more vernacular as we understood it, built on solid foundations. The new vernacular is just mutants of modernity. So everybody can design anything and nobody apparently really can.
With regards to the supposed return to vernacular, I still think it's completely achievable. First, when they self-build, people tend to favour human scales; even if the houses still look like misshapen mutants with Aircon entrails and pink plaster pecked by pigeons, they could be very easily overhauled and turned into something cohesive by, say, a master planner.
People also plant gardens and leave room for trees.
There are two challenges:
a. complete reliance on industrial materials is a challenge in itself. This is Modernism's hidden power level.
b. the general public has terrible tastes. This is true to some extent, and could be easily solved if elites promoted wholesome values instead of consumerist slop, TikTok brain rot and a superficial parroting of 'Western' values.
The trouble with "people" is that few afford to really build something on their own, so most rely on the private entities replacing the communist state in the role of builder for the masses. Virtually all new suburbs lack that needed cohesive master planning, so it's almost worst than vernacular medieval towns (plumbing and electricity make up for the rest of the faults). I think what those medieval towns had and new neighborhoods are lacking is not achievable through master planning. They achieved it organically, and now we don't have that time unfortunately. The speed called for the planning and it's not going to slow down by itself.
As for the tastes, the public always had the poorest taste, but it didn't mater much. We maybe romanticize the old country styles, but I think they built like they built forced by the lack of your "point a. challenge". It's all they could afford, and all they had the knowhow. Expanding the limits of possibilities invites.. let's say.. the "surprise factor". You never know what you're going to get.
This trajectory maps on every kind of human endeavor that has been 'democratized'. Once the stones are ground into pebbles and then sand.. it's hard to put them back together. To keep with the analogy.. a way out might be to come up with a new type of concrete using all the sand. Connecting the dots. Coalesce. Maybe. But we've already seen what the modernists used all the new concrete for. Fingers crossed.
If you've got any ideas on how to start a revival movement, feel free to share them, even if they're just thought experiments.
First I should catch up with your past articles, you put into words many of my "feels". I'm glad I found your ss.
I stopped "architecturing" also because I didn't see any way out of this conundrum. I'm now out of the loop for many years. A bit rusty. And I've never been the theorycel, anyway. But my first thought is any revival should start from above. So "the elites" would be the ones who have to be "tradpunkpilled". I think you are up to a good start here.
I also think that some of us will ride the tiger just by living according to "the principles". Maybe that will lead to communities, maybe not. The best bet is to keep alive the ideals. To quote (supposedly) Gustav Mahler, "Tradition is not the worship of ashes but preservation of fire"
Based.
I completely sympathise with everything you've described. I was even guilty of the elitist smugness architects indulge in.
It's funny that about a year ago I was scrolling through my facebook feed and stumbled across an acid post from one of my tutors (an otherwise based TradOrtho and a polymath) who was mocking some estate agent for publishing an article on architectural styles, allowing the public to decide which ones they preferred.
My former tutor replied that the term 'style' has been rendered useless and is now passe. This was followed by a wave of seal clapping from various Millenial architects, sharing sarcastic encounters where their dumb clients demanded absurd things from them, or weren't cultured enough. The emperor has no clothes, yet all these midwits feel the need to be pedantic about the plebs' lack of education.
Brasilia is a good example of the results of modernism. The town is hostile towards pedestrians and the buildings are hostile to humans. Walking in niemeyer's buildings is a physical and psychological ordeal, the white cement reflects light and heat from all angles, its like being inside a solar oven, trees are non existent and shadow is rare. The inside of the buildings aren't better, the huge windows let too much sun and heat to penetrate, so they need to tint the windows with strong shading to make the space minimally habitable.
I can imagine. I think someone told me that planners didn't stick to Niemeyer's initial street layout and started building a completely different street grid. Is this the case, or am I mixing stories?
The urban planning was actually made by Lucio Costa, Niemeyer was the architect behind the main public buildings.
Oh yea, I remember
Good morning!
Of course you will have likely read Tom Wolfe’s book From Bauhaus to Our House which makes the Modernist Dream look pretty shaky.
But have you considered, are you adequately prepared to address a counterattack, involving the suggestion that classical architecture is one embodiment of classical ideas of beauty, but that there might be others?
You might have heard the famous quotation attributed to Plato…
"I do not mean by beauty of form such beauty as that of animals or pictures, which the many would suppose to be my meaning; but, says the argument, understand me to mean straight lines and circles, and the plane or solid figures which are formed out of them by turning-lathes and rulers and measurers of angles; for these I affirm to be not only relatively beautiful, like other things, but they are eternally and absolutely beautiful..."
…which, says the argument, might be a description of the Barcelona Pavilion, Lever House, or indeed Villa Savoye.
If the classical notions of beauty and proportion informing classical architecture are based around geometry, well, can’t it can be seen and appreciated with much greater clarity in Modern buildings?
Good afternoon.
Thanks for sharing the Plato quote. If I understand correctly, some architects use it to make the case that Modernist minimalism is aesthetically justified because it most clearly embodies Euclidean geometry.
I don't think Classicism was less Euclidean than the International Style. In fact, everything from Romanesque, Gothic, to 19th century Eclecticism relied on pure Euclidean geometry. Decoration is included here. There was no knowledge of complexity theory, non-linear equations, fractals, attractors etc. before mid 20th century.
Now in pre-Modern architecture, pure geometric shapes coexisted with organic complexity. Every edifice was decorated in Greek orders, their facades and interiors were symmetrical, had clear compositional axes; yet this did not inhibit cities to develop organically, following the shapes of hills, offering a wide array of vernacular buildings with varying heights, using local building materials and mimicking shapes seen in nature.
In Modernity anything organic was vehemently rejected and deemed unacceptable, so the Euclidean shapes were magnified and turned into an empty glorification of industry and technical prowess.
Now it's funny that Modernism's successors hated this clinical simplicity and rebelled against it themselves; what is Postmodernism anything other than a rebelious teen mocking his dad? What is contemporary Tectonism, from Zaha Hadid to Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Peter Eisenmann, Thomas Heatherwick - anything other than a total rejection of Euclidean geometry in favour of non-Euclidean parametricism? This whole 'biophilia' craze.
It's what Modernity does - splitting a coherent whole and turning it into polar opposites, which then start warring among themselves, struggling for total dominance.
This is how Carl Jung defines enantiodromia, by the way.
I think we can leave things there, as we have now left architecture proper and have entered political philosophy where we might just disagree, as you might find me much friendlier to human liberty, private property, freedom of conscience, freedom of exchange, market capitalism.
So yeah, you may write me off as a rootless cosmopolitan. 🤷♂️
The Barcelona Pavilion is still great 😉
Sure thing; it's always great when we can discuss things politely. I'm not writing you off. I noticed libertarians are quite open to discussion and not very quick in cancelling those they disagree with.
As a student I used to like the Barcelona Pavilion too, but only because I was told it's nice. Cheers ;)
Certainly I appreciate your eloquent, erudite reply!
The answer for the postmodernist darlings’ collective teenage rebellion is they need to quit!
Yes, Modernism c. 1970 was too tight a straitjacket, excluding anything sensuous, sculptural, shunning even interesting variations like the Streamline Moderne.
Modernist canons of acceptability needed to be broadened, but nobody asked for a complete overturn of every sort of ideal. Indeed didn’t Michael Graves only get his monstrous jukebox [The Portland Building] built only by being the lowest bidder in a government contract? Something like that.
So I don’t blame Modernism as such for PoMo aesthetic violations, their sins are their own
Fair enough. I'd almost be willing to accept the idea that Modernist canons should be broadened, but this leads to another question: what is the valuable essence of Modernism that needs to be preserved?
If by 'Modernism' we simply mean an austere aesthetic that can adapt to contemporary industrial materials, this can work. Many austere styles looked great - Dorian Greek, Perpendicular Gothic, Art Deco.
If the true essence of Modernism consists of the five principles of Le Corbusier (and very similar ones from Bauhaus and Mies), than those principles are simply a pure negation of ancient metaphysics and aesthetics. They're a replacement of a sacramental vision with a technocratic one.
I think one should start from the Cosmic Law, seeing architecture as a reflection of it, and then adapting new means of construction to keep them true to this sacramental vision.
If it's possible to maintain aspects of Modernism while completely divorcing them from the subversive core ideology, then we should be ready to compromise.
Also fair. By “Art Deco” you may mean the pure spare lines, curves of Art Moderne, the Streamline style I was praising earlier. Because Deco is not particularly austere but rather pretty florid, with all manner of fountains and sunbursts and Egyptian influences.
The Modernist argument for the skyscraper is that masonry will only carry loads up to maybe ten storeys. To go higher the weight of the building will need to be carried on steel beams. So the walls are now freed up, they can be anything, including glass.
So yes, you could enclose the beams with 13th century stone and pediments and the rest of it, or you can make a fresh statement.
If that statement honours the canons of proportion, symmetry etc I’m fine with glassfibre panels and glass
Well the issue with skyscrapers, in my view, is deeper than their quantitative merit and its structural justification. In aesthetic and social terms, I think the concept of 'gentle density' warrants against relying on them extensively.
In broader terms, 'Skyscrapers' presuppose an entire set of premises that are not directly linked with architecture. All past civilisations built monumental structures, yet none of them had this utilitarian, 'line go up' function.
I won't write an essay about it; I'll just say I find authors like Neil Postman, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Patrick Deneen, even uncle Ted - to provide a deeper critique of the issues of modernity.
The merits of this critique lie in the fact that they're not just demands for abstract rights, absolute freedom/equality or some Utopian manifesto. They are rooted in Western culture and its institutions.
You might find this interesting:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2017/10/why-you-hate-contemporary-architecture
This one's by a *socialist*, who has basically the same tastes as you. He even includes some non-Western examples, suggesting this is just the way people are.
Thanks for sharing; I read half of it and I think I'll go on a rant here; might turn it into a post at some point.
First, it's undeniable that a society led by the merchant mindset leads to a slow erosion of aesthetics. A concern for people's wellbeing is obviously justified.
This being said, the issue I have with socialists is they force themselves to view history through the most narrow lens possible.
"Handcrafts and ornament are not bourgeois, they are democratic". Brilliant. Now take a breath that you established that. Every Medieval, Ancient or archaic sculptor patted himself on the back after finishing a statue, saying 'today's been a great day for democracy!'
The biggest blind spot in socialists' mentality is the same blind spot libertarians have - attempting to reduce everything to utility (basic human needs) and thus, the primacy of economics. The first group want everything to express the democratic will of the people, the second want to express individual liberty. Both groups need a good dose of psychedelics (not that I endorse it).
Not all human needs are created equal. Even a reductionist thinker like Maslow proposed a hierarchy of needs, which become less primal (economic) the closer we get to the pyramid's top. But a much better classification was given by Scheler and, more recently, Iain McGilchrist.
I. Sacred: connectedness of all things
II. Wisdom: justice, beauty, truth, learning
III. Virtue: courage, loyalty, teamwork, humility, prudence, compassion
IV. Utility: usefulness for satisfying basic needs & wants
According to the scholar and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, our minds are capable of two fundamentally different ways of interacting with the world. The right hemisphere of the brain builds on lower-order values to embrace higher-order values, all of which require affective or moral engagement with the world. The left hemisphere tends to dismiss higher-order values in favour of lower-order ones; it either reduces everything to its utility value or rejects it vehemently.
McGilchrist then proves that lower level values only have meaning when they are reliant on upper level ones. Utility cannot be pursued for its own sake, as the 'paradox of hedonism proves'; it needs to be anchored in virtues, which in turn need to be anchored in wisdom etc.
This understanding of values (which Iain calls 'right-hemispheric and which corresponds with every pre-modern metaphysical system) is the only one that can preserve beauty.
Returning to the article in the link, the tendency to reduce everything to utility becomes obvious. In several parts it reduces aesthetic fulfilment to mental wellbeing ("People trammeled in on all sides by ugliness are often unhappy without even knowing why").
Democracy as the highest conceivable ideal is another example of a lower order value aiming to reduce everything to itself. Why is 'the will of the people' supreme? Is there some objective or divine force that only manifests through plurality? Is there something akin to Divine creation that only happens through emergent bottom-up phenomena, and never top-down? This is obviously not the case, as most surviving historical monuments from all cultures had patrons that were either kings, aristocrats or bourgeois.
If the will of the people is sacred because of some divine zeitgeist that manifests through time, what about all the instances where people vote for things that lead to sickness or destruction? What if the people unanimously vote in favour of legalising opioids or frying their brains on TikTok?
What about the will of the people who decide to submit themselves to God, heteronormativity or some dynasty of kings? Is that collective will all of a sudden not divine, but demonic?
"But let’s leave aside God’s glory—what about ordinary human happiness? One of the most infuriating aspects of contemporary architecture is its willful disdain for democracy."
No, let's not. This particular reductionist mindset (in this case, reducing the Sacred (I) to human pleasure (IV) is what leads to the destruction of beauty.
Other than these issues, I agree with most of the things laid out in the link.