In Making Dystopia, James Stevens Curl calls contemporary architecture ‘psychotic’ and ‘deranged’. But it’s his own views that are dystopian
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.
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Aiming his trembling arquebus at some sitting targets, Curl calls contemporary architecture ‘psychotic’ and ‘deranged’. I have seen Louis Kahn’s India Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, the Farnsworth House in Illinois, Tadao Ando’s Naoshima, Foster’s Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, the Guggenheim in New York and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin and do not find these psychotic or deranged at all. On the contrary, I find them fine, elegant and elevated expressions of the human spirit, at least the equal of the Parthenon or Chartres.
Curl argues for localism. But localism would never have given us Westminster Abbey or St Paul’s, buildings whose designs were borrowed from France and Italy. He admires, quite correctly, the great achievements of Islamic, Gothic and south German rococo. These he says, ‘express everything modernists hated and outlawed’. But that is nonsense.
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