January 21, 2023

BEAUTY IS OBJECTIVE:

Hitler's revenge (James Stevens Curl, 1/21/23, The Critic)

If anyone doubts that the architectural establishment has become totally irresponsible and out of touch with reality, the September 2022 issue of the RIBA Journal (cxxix/8) carried a thoroughly objectionable piece stuffed with innuendo linking critics of the disastrous mess Modernism has made of towns and cities on a global scale with neo-Nazism, racism, etc. Elsewhere, in that publication of the same date, which purports to be the journal of a "professional" body, but seems to be a vehicle for sneering, worthless pseudery, we are informed that the barmy art-school, called Bauhaus, "provides a powerful example of both cross-disciplinary collaboration and design addressed to social purpose", when it does no such thing, and never did. Chillingly, Ursula von der Leyen "has instituted the "New European Bauhaus"--an integral part of the European Green Deal to make the EU climate neutral in 2050". The energy-guzzling buildings of Modernism, and the insistence on wasteful, failing "industrialised" components in building (the ghastly results of which are obvious on every side), promoted by the Bauhäusler, are no sane models for the future, and nor were the "teachers" at the Bauhaus, with their adherences to weird cults, ridiculous affectations of dress, abolition of capitals (architectural and typographical) for ideological reasons, and nihilism. 

It should be remembered that somebody who had been closely involved with German Modernism in the 1920s and 1930s said the Bauhaus was bankrupt in purpose and ideas before it was disbanded by its last Director (the odious Miës van der Rohe) and his colleagues, and that its widespread adoption in the educational establishments in the USA through the efforts of Alfred Hamilton Barr (1902-81), Philip Cortelyou Johnson (1906-2005), and others associated with the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, from the 1930s, was "Hitler's Revenge", no less. And she should have known! The connections of Modernism with Nazism, anti-Semitism (i.e. racism), and cultural nihilism are clear. The truth is the opposite of what the pernicious stuff published in the RIBA Journal has claimed.

The "art" is a function of the ideology, which is why it's so ugly.

Posted by at January 21, 2023 12:00 AM

  

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