When I was younger, one of my favourite books was James Stevens Curl’s The Victorian Celebration of Death. His latest is much less cheerful.
Like one of those innocents who re-enact the Civil War in embarrassing costume on Bank Holidays, Curl has been time-travelling backwards into a pre-modern world. He returns from the past with a crude message that has been familiar since Reginald (Menin Gate) Blomfield told us in the 1930s that modern architecture is a godless conspiracy of foreigners, Jews and Bolsheviks to eradicate an established culture of building, patiently evolved over three millennia.
This is less than a half-truth. Yes, modernist principles, misunderstood by unimaginative planners, often led to atrocious results. Le Corbusier’s ‘vertical garden cities’ became vertical slums. And there is only a sliver of difference between Walter Gropius’s lofty Bauhaus ideals and a crap council estate.
Curl’s ambition is to compose the critique of all critiques, joining a tradition of anti-modern alarm which has included E.M.
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