To read R.R. Reno’s excellent essay, “The Sledgehammer of Modernism,” (be sure to click through his examples) is to realize there is much to lament about the movements of modernist thought as applied to our buildings. Because our visual sensibility can be a form of worship and an invitation to contemplation, the application of skill and the enjoyment of aesthetics matter to the spiritual life. The large and difficult term of modernism suggests empirical fact and measurement…in some way an insistence upon taking charge of the environment as nature becomes a set of laws susceptible to human knowledge. Such an environment thus loses its earlier property as a text upon which the will of a supreme being is inscribed and through which humans can come to understand more profoundly their proper place in an order. In modernity, this is to say, the process of “modernization” is always under way – who has time for tradition and accumulated wisdom? Architecture is important because it is a substantial and public act. These “modern” buildings – their straight lines an invitation to anxiety, the drab, clinical grayness of concrete and glass violent to the soul – degrade shared environments. They are monuments to the supposed rationalist cleansing genius of their creator. It is style and not ideological sincerity that should matter in architecture. Such buildings have all the personality and lovableness of a bureaucracy – where is the subtlety, texture, depth, the public sense of beauty?
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