To the editors:
Nikos Salingaros has previously noted that many architects have, in fact, been forced to relearn what it is to be an architect in order to truly fulfill the role of their profession. I am one of them. As Christopher Alexander observed, our work “has to do with the creation of life and … the task, in any particular project, is to make the building come to life as much as possible.”1 In that process of relearning, James Curl’s Making Dystopia played a key role. His work helped me understand why I had been taught things that often seemed at odds with the reasons I had decided to become an architect.2
In this letter, I would like to expand the discussion by examining the consequences of architectural barbarism in a developing country.
As Curl and Salingaros have noted, many modernist icons visited countries in Asia and South America in an effort to spread their ideology.3 One of these countries was my own, Peru. The conferences Walter Gropius held here were enormously influential. In their wake, Peruvian architecture began to drift away from its traditional construction methods and social origins.4 This shift only served to increase the existing intellectual and economic dependence of a third-world country.5
In the mid-twentieth century, Peru experienced numerous social conflicts and natural disasters. These events came to be seen as opportunities to rebuild society and improve social welfare. People migrated from one city to another, looking for opportunities that eluded them in their hometowns. This led to an increase in the demand for housing.6 Around the same time, earthquakes destroyed entire cities, leaving many people homeless.7 The leaders of the modernist movement assumed the responsibility for rebuilding the country. Their representatives managed to convince politicians and public administrators that modernist ideology offered the best hope for improving the lives of the people and their cities.
There was, in fact, no shortage of housing in Peru. This was not the problem. People who moved to Lima—the capital city and the most developed in our centralist economy—built their own houses at the city’s outskirts using traditional methods they had been taught in their hometowns.8 Collectivity, collaboration, and self-management all played important roles in these construction projects. The real problem with housing in Peru was its quality, which was a direct consequence of poverty.9 The solution proposed by the modernist movement was to build new houses and new neighborhoods for a new society—a new modern society.
The same story was repeated in other Latin American countries. The modern dystopia found in South America became a laboratory for modernists to test their pet theories, often at the expense of the local inhabitants. The city of Brasilia was one of the most prominent examples. A number of cities in Peru—each of which had its own vibrant cultural heritage—were subsequently altered to reflect modern ideals. As a result, unique cityscapes were permanently disfigured by the large-scale construction of sterile housing units.10 It was a solution that failed to address the real problems and that served only to alienate people from the cities they lived in. Planners eliminated the only link to the city and a principal link that had been shared among inhabitants: the street.11
Modernist buildings were no more effective in solving the underlying problems with Peru’s housing than the barriadas, or shanty towns.12 Nonetheless, the sterile modernist aesthetic was promoted in Peru as an image of progress. Many politicians became adherents, convincing the population that this was the way forward. The cities they left behind are now widely reviled.13 Lima has been ranked as one of the least livable cites in South America, especially in terms of pollution and traffic congestion.14 For a city that was once known as la Ciudad de los Reyes, the City of Kings, this is a tragedy.
In poor countries such as Peru, architects are seen as members of a social elite that are disconnected from the harsh reality of everyday life in our cities. Some organizations and public institutions have attempted to change this view, but the legacy of modernism makes it difficult. When people try to identify those responsible for the chaos we see today, they inevitably point to mayors or public administrators. They do not tend to blame the city’s designers and those who benefitted from that chaos—the modernist architects who prioritized cars over people and allowed countless culturally and socially valuable buildings to be razed and replaced with white elephants.
When discussing Lima’s past, we need to exercise some caution. Although once a beautiful city, it was also one in which many of its citizens were excluded and their needs ignored. The “Gold-glittering Lima,” as Bertolt Brecht described it in 1935, was only experienced by a wealthy few.15 A large part of the population lived in misery, suffering due to the social and economic inequality that afflicted the country during that era.16 It would be wrong to pretend that Lima’s past was better than its present. Although problems with inequality and corruption persist, more and more people can now embrace aspects of city life that were previously denied to them by discrimination and racism.
Despite the many problems facing the region—in Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, Argentina, and Ecuador17— Peru has enjoyed relative political and economic stability during recent years. The country has experienced considerable growth as a result. This has not been without some serious drawbacks. The construction industry, for example, has demolished traditional neighborhoods under the guise of modernizing them. The embrace of a neoliberal economic model has led to growth,18 but at the expense of our cityscapes.
As Salingaros observes, amid the uncontrolled growth of the construction industry, buildings attuned to human needs are only studied as objects of appreciation and contemplation. Buildings of this type are not seen as solutions to any contemporary problems, such as those found in Lima. As a result of opposition and intimidation from members of the modernist cult, these buildings are no longer reproduced. Efforts to modernize the city in order to make it a better place to live are, in fact, having the opposite effect.
The scientific method is not mentioned when architecture is taught. Science is only employed as a justification for the imposition of new forms and shapes. I commend the efforts of Salingaros to encourage more scientists—including biologists, psychologists, sociologists, and physicists—to think about the role played by architects and their work in the built environment and in people’s wellbeing. I know a number of scientists who are deeply interested in these topics, but are reluctant to question the work of architects. There is simply too much at stake for these topics to go unaddressed.
To date, Curl’s book has not been widely discussed in Peru. This is probably because there is no Spanish-language edition. I hope a translation will be published soon and that readers can discover and discuss historical perspectives and points of view other than what is currently taught. With a Spanish edition in hand, students could then start debating the ideas of their professors and ask why they are only being taught part of the story.
Miguel Córdova Ramírez
Nikos Salingaros replies:
Miguel Córdova Ramírez poignantly describes how the architectural cult took over the architecture of his country, Peru, and how the consequences were negative overall. Modernist ideology and its associated industrial images penetrated deeply into the national conscience. Cities were radically reshaped to reflect a narrow set of abstractions. Enormous damage was done to evolved, indigenous, sustainable architecture that was perfectly adaptable to the local climate, geography, and society.19 This story is repeated throughout Latin America, and indeed throughout the entire world.
The influx of new building techniques and more advanced scientific knowledge coming from twentieth-century Europe should have been a welcome addition to the nation’s culture and economy. However, it did not work out that way. The reason is that instead of valuing the type of architecture that Peruvians knew how to build, and which was the most logical and practical for them, the imported styles and techniques replaced all of that. Therefore, instead of helping an existing rich and highly developed building and planning tradition, European modernism swept everything clean and substituted its own cult images.
Those of us who are trying to create a science out of architecture recognize this event as a catastrophic loss of inherited practical knowledge.20 It belies the slogan of sustainability that dominant architectural culture has adopted of late, because native architecture and urban typologies turn out to be the most sustainable by far.21 When we add the fact that European modernism is unscientific,22 contrary to the self-generated propaganda that the modernists themselves spread, then its importation can only represent a disaster.
Despite this reality, the idea sold itself to all the powerful decision makers, as well as many common people. The propaganda used to promote international modernism is undeniably attractive. Slogans that must have read something like Economic and material progress is possible only through these abstract shapes! were implemented in fashionable buildings. Added to them were the liberating freedom of the automobile and the promise of social equality through wonderful new, clean, shiny social housing. In a country struggling with income inequality and poverty, those promises were impossible to resist. A major contributing factor was the politicization of architectural style, falsely identifying international modernism with left-leaning and liberal political ideals. James Stevens Curl’s book Making Dystopia and Malcolm Millais’s books Exploding the Myths of Modern Architecture and Le Corbusier, the Dishonest Architect reveal that this was just deceptive marketing.23
What happened after the first experiments showed that glass and steel skyscrapers were disastrous for many sectors of the local economy? Nothing. A power system, which profited from the new construction, had by then been established, and has proved impossible to dislodge ever since. The first reason is because of the initial building and ongoing maintenance costs of those skyscrapers. Second, the skyscrapers coupled with the consumerist car city, and immediately shackled the entire society to the financial burden of imported petroleum. The pretense of modernist design being socially conscious is immediately apparent.
Never mind the growing perception that the modernist aesthetic creates inhuman environments that repel the human body—because our neurology evolved to most comfortably process a very special type of organized complexity.24 The worst of these consequences occurred with the false promise of utopian social housing.25 Whatever the disadvantages of self-built housing—and there are many—at least life is allowed a basic freedom: the freedom to control the shape of one’s own living environment.26 People traded that freedom away for concrete prisons that oppress both their body and their spirit. It is historically significant that the move away from modernist dogmatism and toward adaptive architecture arguably began with Christopher Alexander’s PREVI (Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda) project for social housing outside Lima in 1969: “[A] split jury thought that Christopher Alexander’s proposal was a ‘milestone’ which addressed the … Peruvian conditions and produced an imaginative solution for low income housing [while] offering maximum freedom of individual choice.”27
Any attempt to answer how this nonadaptive architectural tradition could have arisen—and become a permanent source of national pride for Latin Americans—stirs up a hornet’s nest of explanations. Curl’s book Making Dystopia is an in-depth examination of those factors. The book comes exactly a century after the founding of the Bauhaus. The German government, together with distinguished and international architectural groups, celebrated the centenary of the Bauhaus in 2019 with lots of fanfare.
Even though the following description is a harsh one, I believe it is accurate. International modernism was a massive experiment on the people of the developing world. Those in power treated populations as guinea pigs, imposing fantastical and untested building shapes, strange and unappealing urban spaces, and streets and cities fit only for automobiles. These deliberate actions violate the most basic moral principles in the scientific world. But the perpetrators were not scientists, contrary to what they claimed about themselves. Architects then and since are salesmen—with few saleswomen—eager for profit and fame. Local politicians, intellectuals, and common people went along for the reasons that Professor Curl describes in his book, and about which I have also written.28
The tragedy of it all is that, after this massive social experiment failed, no one in power has had the slightest interest in fixing the damage. In order to correct a wrong, one has to first admit the error. In the case of nonadaptive architecture that destroyed cultures, societies, and traditions, we have not even reached that first essential stage of enlightenment. Architecture schools in Latin America—and around the world—continue to teach that international modernism and its offshoots are the only architecture permitted today. The so-called architecture-industrial complex continues with business as usual,29 inviting the latest fashionable star architect to erect one more monstrous building in a prominent site.30
Although never made explicit, a subliminal message seems to be that the heritage structures of our past, which are quite different for each culture, were created by a different people, distinct from us today. Those who built adaptive, human-scale environments were primitive; we owe no allegiance to them. It is as if the original population that built these adaptive, old-fashioned structures died off, and we simply moved in to occupy an empty city. The official myth is that we today represent a superior race, and whatever we build, which conforms strictly to cult ideology, far surpasses the value of heritage structures.31
The architecture-industrial complex erased the distinct inherited building cultures of people around the world. It did this by condemning evolved and adaptive creative traditions, and by turning people against their own culture. To prevent any possible future apostasy, it whipped up a fanatic fervor to destroy the past. Progressive citizens have to prove their modernity by obliterating their own history, discarding physical examples of artifacts, buildings, and cities. The period from before the conversion to modernism becomes empty, as supposedly nothing of value existed before then. Older artifacts, buildings, and living urban fabric are labeled as aberrations, and their continued existence proves an embarrassment to the official propaganda machine.
We can guess the reasons for why this colonialist takeover and its replacement of traditional culture was so successful. But it stretches our imagination to realize that this was the second colonialist takeover of the same region. The Spanish invasion during the sixteenth century came first, brutally achieved through superior military technology. That event left deep scars in the national psyche and generated unresolved social forces that have influenced politics ever since. The second colonialist invasion took place during the twentieth century and was entirely peaceful. Its success was guaranteed because the local intelligentsia enthusiastically supported it.
We are told that we cannot build emotionally nourishing structures today, for technical reasons. Whenever people point out that this claim is untrue,32 then the architectural cult brings out other arguments: even if we can indeed build in this manner today, we are forbidden to do so for ethical, moral, and philosophical reasons. On closer examination, however, those supposed reasons are exposed as lies. But proscriptions against building nourishing structures that might resemble traditional ones have been socialized into our society over decades. After all these years, people have learned to automatically accept absurd diktats for shaping their environment.
Millions of people could better their quality of life today through very modest tectonic interventions. Yet that is forbidden by the cult: banned by the media, illegal according to post-war building and planning regulations, and very likely to be condemned by society at large. Once our population is socialized to reject life-enhancing features of the environment, it is almost impossible to escape from this mental prison. Cognitive dissonance paralyzes actions that would challenge the cult.33 Psychological conditioning is so successful that an individual who attempts to break out of unhealthy social norms may feel physically ill. Rejecting all-pervasive dogma that one has grown up with is a frightening experience very few persons can face.
When people build for themselves, the process is controlled directly and the result is more adaptive than when architects get involved. Design is primarily generated by physiological feedback and remembered traditions, tempered to different degrees by accepted images of upper-middleclass social aspirations. The state, however, believing it is acting in society’s best interest, clamps down on any deviation from cult-approved typologies. It wastes resources in wholescale replacement instead of upgrading informal settlements, because those do not conform to the cult’s image of industrial-modernist utopia.
The reader may accept, or at least ruminate on, some of the explanation of how the architectural cult took over society’s thinking process and shaped cultural trends. Yet this explanation does not explain why building activity is predominantly modernist. There are many strange belief-based cults around the world, but they do not influence how cities are shaped. To understand this aspect of the argument, we need to turn to the economic power of the architecture-industrial complex.
Since scientists tend to live in a fairyland cocoon, they may not be aware of the absolute power that global construction and development exert over governments.34 Vast money interests decide not only who wins competitions, contracts, and prizes, but also which politician gets elected and re-elected. The construction and real-estate-speculation machine—the architecture-industrial complex—asks legislators for favors, and usually gets them. In many countries, government, powerful industrial lobbies, and organized crime enjoy a convenient working relationship. Real-estate speculators with deep pockets decide which buildings to demolish, and then choose to replace them with anything they want.
Attraction to power is what draws students toward architecture in the first place.35 Having unlimited freedom to design iconic structures without regard for their inhabitants’ sensibilities proves to be an irresistible appeal. And the larger the structure, the more intense is the accompanying sense of power. Ignoring the dark side of this power game—its reliance on pseudoscience, and its involvement with moral and political corruption—young architects are taught to use technology completely detached from science. When they become professionals, this insensitivity to scientific knowledge and the mechanisms of life becomes an acceptable means of shaping the world top-down.
Instead of being taught an understanding of basic science, students are encouraged to follow the example of celebrated architects who mouth irrelevant scientific-sounding words. Moreover, architecture critics vandalize scientific culture by repeating nonsensical justifications for buildings that lack adaptive human qualities.36 Taking its cue from marketing that drives fashionable projects, architectural training establishes desirable trends linked to unscientific ways of thinking.37 Young, would-be architects quickly pick up an ethically and logically distorted thought process as an essential key to professional success.
Can we educate our children in morality and science when society accepts dishonesty and pseudoscience in architecture?38 Nonadaptive architectural images flooding the media handicap society’s efforts at teaching critical thinking in general. Prevalent explanations of architectural modernity are part of a myth full of gaps. For most people, a pseudoscientific “image of modernity” replaces the true modernity produced by scientific advances.39 This illusory modernity demands disconnection from traditional sources of emotional nourishment. People are bullied or tricked to live in a fundamentally different reality than what biology and physics provide.40 Many of them unfortunately get used to this and never realize what they have lost.
At the end of his letter, Córdova Ramírez calls for a Spanish edition of Professor Curl’s book, which I would welcome. However, publishers invest in translating a book only if they judge that there will be sufficient readership for it. Major international publishers in the Spanish-speaking countries produce shelves-full of translated books featuring the work of contemporary star architects, as well as new hagiographies of the modernist masters. But there is little interest in any book that questions the cult’s ideology. The cult dominates the minds of both practicing architects and those interested in reading about architecture, so that anything outside the approved reading list has a hard time getting to market.
