GIVEN THAT BEAUTY IS A FUNCTION OF cREATION, HOW COULD mODERNISM HELP BUT HATE IT:

Modernists do not care how buildings look: they never did. In 1954 Peter Reyner Banham (1922-88), a pupil of Nikolaus Pevsner, of course, and one of the gurus of trendiness and Modernism, declared, ex cathedra, that "façade treatments do not form part of the common theory of the Modern Movement ... the problem of the façade does not exist; form follows function, and when the problems of the interior have been correctly resolved, the exterior form will be found to have crystallized into an unarguable solution". And John Summerson (1904-92) declared that the chief contribution of the Modern Movement was "social", and that the source of its "unified approach" lay in the architect's "programme", which he defined as the "description of spatial dimensions, spatial relationships and other physical conditions required for the convenient performance of specific functions ... and the resultant unity ... is the unity of a process". From these chilling statements any possibility that a work claiming to be "architecture" might have any emotional or æsthetic impact was ignored: the Modernists insisted all that was  required was "designing" a building from the inside out, letting its external appearance look after itself. These factors go a long way to explaining why the Modern Movement failed to present anything like an agreeable face to the world, let alone to the street.

Historically, true architecture involved choice, a certain freedom of action, conscious attempts to establish hierarchies of values, and design concerned with metaphors through which those sets of values were made overt and agreeably expressed. It was not "all about structure", as doctrinaire Modernists would hold, and it was not about the sort of minimal effort that produced far too many badly functioning, seedy, leaking, industrialised, ugly buildings in response to loudly trumpeted, bullying manifestoes and idiotic simplistic slogans. The Modernists' pseudo-moralising fixations on supposed "function", industrialised methods of construction, rejection of everything in favour of the "clean slate", and scary pronouncements concerning "total architecture" have produced painfully obvious failures in the context of the urban environment. Pevsner himself, confessing to "National Socialist feelings", claimed in the first edition of his Pioneers (p. 206, 1936), that the Modern Movement was the new style of the twentieth century because it was a genuine style as opposed to a passing fashion, and was totalitarian (my italics ... the word was dropped in later editions).  

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