The New Brutalism – Part Two
Ed Driscoll quotes from Theodore Dalrymple.
The middle class reformers thought of poverty wholly in physical terms: an insufficiency of food and warmth, a lack of space. How, they asked, could people come to the finer things in life if their basic requirements were so inadequately met? What could freedom mean (I remember my father asking) in the absence of decent housing conditions? Since social problems such as crime and delinquency (which we were soon to discover were in their infancy) were attributable to physical deprivation—to the environment rather than the criminal or delinquent—the construction of decent housing would solve all problems at once.
But what was decent housing? A civil servant, Parker Morris, provided the answer: a certain number of cubic yards of living space per inhabitant. The Ministry of Housing adopted the Parker Morris standards for all public housing; they governed the size and number of rooms—and that was all.
But that does not answer the question. Building housing with so many cubic feet of space, so much distance between buildings for light and air, does not answer why the buildings were made so physically ugly, does not answer why the open space was so cheerless?
Or perhaps it does. All problems of human life were boiled down to mathematical formulae of so many feet per person, so many square yards between buildings. With that all ornamentation, all of those frivolities, were useless extensions of the ego of the builder. Do away with that and the natural would arise.
The natural what? Humans won’t live like that, they will decorate. And the pure concrete walls were tagged with graffiti, and the messages were nothing more than warnings, a prismatic piss for one wolf-pack or another.
The problem for Le Courbusier and the others of his cursed ilk is that he and they desired to rule, and found that to do so they had to lower humans to the point that they counted for little. Think of him as a Saruman whose Isengard did not fall.
There is difference between governing and ruling; the first uses reins when needed, the second uses shackles from the first. And we are surprised that all we get out of these new Isengards are uruks?
- Entries
What struck me in both, however, was how insulated many architects appear to be from the humans that employ them and live in their creations. Some even seem to resent people and their messy, unorganized lives. Many even act as if they hold people in contempt. Viewing the kinds of sterile living and working spaces they try to shoehorn human beings into always angers me.
It's no accident that architecture is a major aspect of totalitarian regimes everywhere, throughout history. Where else can the fascists and communists and other, less overtly evil "ists" impose their grand vision on th eteeming masses? And those masses had damn well better teem in the manner they are directed.
It was not an answer to a rhetorical question. It was a discussion of, among other things, the difference between absolute poverty--not enough to eat--and relative poverty--most people have more money than you.
He asked whether it was better to live in a Thai peasant village--after describing it--surviving on hard labor and netting maybe $100 for the year, or one of the dreadful housing projects of the South Bronx, where you got $35,000 to $50,000 in cash, kind, and services on the sole condition you not get caught committing honest employment.
And his answer was that it was, once you got enough to eat, all culture.
I started asking various folks whether it had ever occurred to them that the Ingalls family (Little House on The Prarie, books or television) was poor. What did they have? If you haven't thought of them as poor, why not?
I figured that, if you could think about why you didn't think of them as poor, you'd know something about poverty.