Confessions of a Heretic

by Roger Scruton

  American visitors to Paris, Rome, Prague or Lisbon, comparing what they see with what is familiar from their own continent, will recognise how careless their countrymen have been, in their spasmodic attempt to create cities. But the American visitor who leaves the route prescribed by the Ministries of Tourism will quickly see that the miracle of a town like Paris is to be explained only by the fact that few modern architects have been allowed to get their hands on it. Elsewhere European cities are going the way of cities in America: high-rise offices in the centre, surrounded first by a ring of lawless dereliction, and then by the suburbs, to which those who work in the city flee at the end of the day. Admittedly there is nothing in Europe to compare with the vandalism wreaked on Buffalo, Tampa or New Brunswick (to take three cities that have caused me particular pain). Nevertheless the same moral disaster is beginning to afflict us – the disaster of cities in which no one wishes to live, in which public spaces are vandalised and private spaces boarded up.

  Until recently European architects have either connived at the evisceration of our cities or actively promoted it. Relying on the spurious rhetoric of Le Corbusier and Gropius, they have endorsed the totalitarian projects of the political elite, whose goal after the war was not to restore the cities but to clear away the ‘slums’, so completing the work of bombardment. By ‘slums’ was meant the harmonious classical streets of affordable houses, seeded with local industries, corner shops, schools and places of worship, which had made it possible for real communities to flourish in the centre of our towns. The ‘slums’ were to be replaced by high-rise blocks in open parkland, of the kind proposed by Le Corbusier in his plan for the demolition of Paris north of the Seine. Meanwhile all forms of employment and enjoyment were to be located elsewhere. Public buildings were to be expressly modernist, with steel and concrete frames and curtain walls, but with no facades or intelligible apertures, and no perceivable relation to their neighbours. Important monuments from the past were to be preserved, but often set in new and aesthetically annihilating contexts, such as that provided for London’s St Paul’s.

  Although citizens protested, and conservation societies fought all across Europe for the old idea of what a city should look like, the modernists won the battle of ideas, took over the schools of architecture, and set out to ensure that the classical discipline of architecture would never again be learned, since it would never again be taught. The vandalisation of the curriculum was successful: students at European schools of architecture are no longer taught the grammar of the classical Orders; they are no longer taught to understand mouldings, to draw existing monuments, urban streets, the human figure or such vital aesthetic phenomena as the fall of light on a Corinthian capital or the shadow of a campanile on a sloping roof; they are no longer taught facades, cornices, doorways or anything else that could be gleaned from a study of the great classical treatises of Serlio and Palladio. The new curriculum has been designed to produce ideologically driven engineers, whose representational skills would go no further than ground plans and isometric drawings, and who would be able to undertake the gargantuan ‘projects’ required by the socialist state: shovelling people into housing estates, laying out industrial areas and business parks, driving highways through ancient city centres, and generally reminding the middle classes that Big Brother is overlooking them and that they are no longer in charge.

  Now all that is changing. The generation that rebelled against socialist planning, rebelled also against the collectivist urbanism of the modernists. The alienating architecture of the post-war period was associated in their thinking, and for very good reasons, with the statist politics of socialism. It symbolised the approach to human life of people who believed that they alone had the answers, and that they alone could dictate their answers to the rest of us. The mood of rebellion against this attitude was especially evident in Britain, where the work of the Luftwaffe had in many cities been brought near to completion by the post-war planners. Architects like Quinlan Terry, Liam O’Connor, Demetri Porphyrios and John Simpson, who grew up amid the advancing chaos, burst the chains forged by their obligatory modernist education and began designing buildings and quarters in a classical style. Meanwhile, working in comparative obscurity as an assistant to the eclectic James Stirling, was a graduate of Stuttgart University’s modernist school of architecture, Léon Krier, born in Luxembourg in 1946, who was beginning to publish the laconic monographs and satirical drawings that were later to form the basis of an anti-modernist manifesto.

  Krier has pursued a career in architecture, but he is also a philosopher and social thinker, who believes that architectural modernism is not just ugly but based in profound mistakes about the nature of human society. As he put it in a recent interview with Nikos Salingaros:

  Humanity lives by trial and error, sometimes committing errors of a monumental scale. Architectural and urbanist modernism belong – like communism – to a class of errors from which there is little or nothing to learn or gain. They are ideologies which literally blind even the most intelligent and sensitive people to unacceptable wastes, risks, and dangers. Modernism’s fundamental error, however, is to propose itself as a universal (i.e. unavoidable and necessary) phenomenon, legitimately replacing and excluding traditional solutions.

  What is needed, therefore, is a repertoire of real solutions to the problems of urban design. And that is what Krier has set out to produce.

  During the seventies, with the help of his equally talented brother Rob, Léon Krier began producing designs aimed at showing how the urban fabric of Europe could be conserved, enhanced and expanded, while answering to the real needs of modern people. A few enlightened city councils – notably those of Luxembourg and Bremen – commissioned plans and projects from the Kriers, though largely of an exploratory kind. But it was only in the eighties, when Krier was invited by the Prince of Wales to plan the new town of Poundbury adjacent to the city of Dorchester, that he was granted the opportunity he needed, to put his ideas into practice. His work immediately began to attract the attention of the critics. Professional architects, appalled at the threat to the modernist monopoly, did their best to destroy Krier’s reputation, and to dismiss his work as that of a nostalgic dreamer. But, to their consternation, Poundbury has attracted enthusiastic residents, as well as industries and shops; it has become a place of pilgrimage, as popular with tourists as any medieval city, and a model that is being followed elsewhere. The New Urbanist movement, with members in America, Italy, Spain and Britain, owes much to the thinking of Léon Krier, and Krier’s credo, Architecture: Choice or Fate, published in 1998, is slowly becoming a standard work, although one profoundly hated by the architectural establishment. Krier has worked in America, submitting designs for the New Urbanist development of Seaside, Florida, where he built a house for himself, and also designing the impressive village hall at Windsor, Florida – a new community conceived according to the principles that he defends.

  Krier presents the first principle of architecture as a deduction from Kant’s Categorical Imperative (which tells us to act only on that maxim which we can will as a universal law). You must ‘build in such a way that you and those dear to you will use your buildings, look at them, work in them, spend their holidays in them, and grow old in them with pleasure …’ The principle is confirmed, Krier suggests, by the modernists themselves. For they all follow the inverse of the famous principle enunciated by Mandeville in The Fable of the Bees. Modernist vandals like Richard Rogers and Norman Foster (who between them are responsible for some of the worst acts of destruction in our European cities) live in elegant old houses in charming locations, where artisan styles, traditional materials and humane scales dictate the architectural ambience. Instead of Mandeville’s principle – ‘private vices, public benefits’ – they follow the law of private benefits, public vice. The private benefit of a charming location is paid for by the public vice of tearing our cities apart. Rogers in particular is famous for creating buildings that have no relation
to their surroundings, which cannot easily change their use, which are extremely expensive to maintain, and which destroy the character of the neighbourhood – buildings like the Centre Beaubourg in Paris, for which a great acreage of humane streets had to be cleared and which deliberately turns its back on the historic quarter of the Marais, or the Lloyd’s Building in London, which is a piece of polished kitchen-ware surmounted by a pile of junk, dumped in the City as though dropped there from an aeroplane.

  Traditional architecture produced forms expressive of human interests – palaces, houses, factories, churches, temples – and these sit easily under their names. The forms of modern architecture, Krier argues, are nameless – denoting not familiar objects and their uses but ‘so-called objects’, objects which are known at best by a nickname, and never by a real name of their own. Thus the Berlin Congress Hall is known as the ‘pregnant oyster’, Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles as the ‘madhouse’, the new building at Queen’s College Oxford as the ‘parking lot’, and the UN building in New York as the ‘radiator’. The nickname, Krier argues, is the correct name for a kitsch object – i.e. for an object that is faked, and which sits in its surroundings like a masked stranger at a family party. Classical forms result from convention and consensus over centuries; they earn their names – house, palace, church, factory – from the natural understanding that they elicit, and nothing about them is forced. The modernist forms, by contrast, have been imposed upon us by people in the grip of ideology. They derive no human significance from the materials that compose them, from the labour that produced them or from the function that they fulfil, and their monumental quality is merely faked. The skyscraper office block and landscraper shopping mall speak only of their specific functions – and this forbids them from acquiring symbolic value, or from conveying a vision of the city as a public space.

  Krier identifies the leading error of modernism as that introduced by Corbusier, Gropius and Mies, which was to separate load-bearing and outward facing parts. Once buildings had become curtains hung on invisible frames all the understood ways of creating and conveying meanings were destroyed. Even if the curtain is shaped like a classical façade, it is a fake façade, and one with only a blank expression. Usually, however, it is a sheet of glass or concrete panels, without intelligible apertures. The building itself is hidden, and its posture, as a member of the city, standing among neighbours and resting its weight upon their common ground, is meaningless because unobservable. All relation to neighbouring structures, to the street and to the sky is lost, in a form that has nothing to convey apart from the starkness of its geometry.

  The curtain-wall idiom has other negative effects. Buildings constructed in this way are both expensive to maintain and of uncertain durability; they use materials that no one fully understands, which have a coefficient of expansion so large that all joints loosen within a few years, and which involve massive environmental damage in their production and in their inevitable disposal within a few decades as waste. Modernist buildings are ecological as well as aesthetic catastrophes: sealed environments, dependent on a constant input of energy, and subject to the ‘sick-building syndrome’ that arises when nobody can open a window or let in a breath of fresh air. Moreover, such buildings use no architectural vocabulary, so that they cannot be ‘read’ as a classical building is read. This ‘unreadability’ is felt by the passer-by as a kind of rudeness. Modernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the space they create around themselves is not a public space but an unravelling of the urban fabric.

  This failure to provide a readable vocabulary is not a trivial defect of the modernist styles: it is the reason why modernist buildings fail to harmonise with their neighbours. In architecture as in music, harmony is a relation between independently meaningful parts, an achievement of order from elements that create and respond to valency. There are no chords in modernist architecture, only lines – lines which may come to an end, but which achieve no closure. The lack of vocabulary also explains the alienating effect of a modern airport, like Newark or Heathrow. Unlike the classical railway station, which guides the traveller securely and reassuringly to ticket office, to platform and to the public concourse, the typical airport has no architectural symbols that carry those meanings on their face. It is a mass of written signs, all competing for attention, all amplifying the sense of urgency yet nowhere offering the point of visual repose. Perhaps the most relaxing and functional public spaces in America are the few classically conceived railway stations – Union Station in Washington, for example, or Grand Central Station, New York – places where architecture has displaced the written sign, and where people, however urgently caught up in travelling, are for the moment content just to be. It is significant that when McKim, Mead and White’s great Penn Station, modelled on the baths of Caracalla in Rome, was scheduled for demolition in 1962, even modernists like Louis Kahn joined in the futile protest. The demolition went ahead, since American property law never cedes ground to civic virtue. But it is widely regretted, as much on account of the mean, low-ceilinged space that now alienates the would-be traveller by rail, as of the hideous and oppressive structure on top of it.

  Such considerations supplement the criticisms of the ‘zoning’ idea which, as Jane Jacobs argued in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, has been largely responsible for the flight from the centre and the loss of the humane and lived-in street. What makes Krier new, however, and so important for us at the critical point which we have now reached, when everyone apart from professional architects recognises that our cities can be saved only if the centrifugal is replaced by a centripetal force, is that he has a clear and persuasive remedy, one that could easily be adopted by town planners and builders everywhere, and which would be adopted immediately if it were put to the vote.

  Krier’s solution is to replace the ‘downtown plus suburbs’ idea with that of the polycentric settlement. If people move out, then let it be to new urban centres, with their own public spaces, public buildings, places of work and leisure: let the new settlements grow, as Poundbury has grown next to Dorchester, not as suburbs but as towns. For then they will recapture the true goal of settlement, which is the human community in a place that is ‘ours’, rather than individual plots scattered over a place that is no one’s. They will create a collection of somewheres in place of the ever-expanding nowhere. This solution has a precedent in London, where the city of London grew next to the city of Westminster in friendly competition, and where the residential areas of Chelsea, Kensington, Bloomsbury and Whitechapel grew as autonomous villages rather than over-spills from the existing centres. All that is needed to achieve this effect, Krier argues, is a master plan. By this he does not mean one of those sinister experiments in social engineering that appealed to the modernists, but a simple set of side-constraints, within which people can make the choices best suited to their needs.

  Krier’s master plan involves an overall lay-out, a street plan for each quarter, and rules governing such things as the shape of plots, the number of floors permitted (five, in Krier’s view, is the natural maximum), and the materials and technical configurations to which the buildings should conform. The aim is to control the quality of ‘normal, regular and inevitable building’. At present it is only the exceptional building that attracts the attention of the planners, and the exceptional building is usually designed, like those of Daniel Libeskind and Frank Gehry, to stand out rather than to blend in – to focus attention on itself, rather than on the ordinary solaces of a human community. It is not the exceptional building but the inevitable building that dictates the ambience in which ordinary people work and live. It is here that rules are principally needed, and it is to the shape and aspect of the inevitable building that the old classical pattern-books (such as those by Asher Benjamin and Minard Lafever, used by the original builders of the New England towns) were directed.

  The plan should conform to Krier’s ‘ten-minute rule’, meaning that it should be possible
for any resident to walk within ten minutes to the places that are the real reason for his living among strangers. This ten-minute rule is not as demanding as Americans might think: Paris, Rome, Florence, Madrid, London and Edinburgh all conform to it, as would the American suburbs if they grew as Krier suggests, as separate centres in a ‘polypolis’, so that people could work, shop, relax and worship in places close to home. Good urban planning does not mean creating distance between people in the manner of Frank Lloyd Wright’s ocean-to-ocean suburbs, but bringing people together in ways that enhance their enjoyment of the place where they communally are. That is the goal of the city, and it is, Krier argues, easily achievable. The ‘polypolis’ will be a network of genuine public spaces, in which the ideal and the fact of communal settlement is recorded in the lie of the street and the genial side-by-sideness of the buildings. Every visible detail should be architectural, Krier argues, since every such detail is part of the public space. Traditional building-styles conformed spontaneously to that principle, since they were controlled by good manners: the builder knew that he was adding to the public space of the town, and that he must conform to its unspoken rules of politeness. As Krier puts it:

  All buildings, large or small, public or private, have a public face, a façade; they therefore, without exception, have a positive or negative effect on the quality of the public realm, enriching or impoverishing it in a lasting and radical manner. The architecture of the city and public space is a matter of common concern to the same degree as laws and language – they are the foundation of civility and civilisation. Without their common acceptance there can be no constitution nor maintenance of a normal civilised life. They cannot be imposed and their common rejection is not evidence of misunderstanding but of misconception …