To the editors:

I am most grateful to Professor Salingaros for his perspicacious review of my Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism.

Salingaros has correctly pointed to one of the biggest frauds perpetrated: the claims that the architecture of the modernist movement is functional, rational, and based on science. Its promoters pour out incomprehensible drivel; those adulating them confuse obfuscation and the unintelligible with profundity.

The recent outpourings of hagiographies concerning the Bauhaus and its protagonists, notably Walter Gropius, demonstrates that idolatry, which theology teaches is a great sin, is alive and well, and that the institution, founded in the wreck of post-1918 Germany, still rests in a glow of uncritical acclaim. Those who give it that acclaim ignore the facts of a régime involving enemas, meals of garlic mush, and infantile play instead of the acquisition of craft skills and intellectual development. As I have noted elsewhere, the fact is that Gropius was not a good architect.¹ He could not draw and relied on collaborators such as Adolf Meyer, Carl Fieger, and Ernst Neufert to realize his buildings for him. Gropius was “a politician, an enabler, and an influential theorist and pedagogue,”² whose writings do not live up to his reputation.³ Virtually everything he claimed the Bauhaus did, such as unify all the arts and crafts, reestablish something like the medieval masons’ workshops responsible for the design and construction of the great cathedrals, and much else, resulted in just the opposite.

As Salingaros has so eloquently noted, I have studied the ruination of towns and cities for most of my life. I have tried to understand why the wreckers have been so successful, and have endeavored to explain this phenomenon in my work. C. F. A. Voysey, Baillie Scott, and other creative architects opposed the regimentation of architectural education under the control of a central organization, which they perceived, correctly, as highly dangerous. They sensed that the cult of modernism would make anything other than adherence to that cult impossible. This turned out to be absolutely true. Anyone attempting to step out of line in schools of architecture, which were really centers for indoctrination and brainwashing, would be failed.

Modernism in architecture, for the first time in the history of the world, succeeded in imposing one manner of building globally, no matter what the climatic conditions, local requirements, and skills available. It ignored context completely, because the past was of no value to its perpetrators. When drawing boards and T squares were consigned to oblivion, practitioners programmed computers to produce structures that conformed to the latest fad, such as Derrida-inspired deconstructivism—a topic on which Saligaros has written intelligently and with devastating accuracy⁴—and curvy parametricism. Buildings became stratospherically costly and alien to humanity, considering neither environmental nor human needs. One can hear very clearly the sibilance of banknotes cascading into grasping paws, the oily squelch of palms being greased, the click of computer keys as eyewatering sums are transferred from one account to another, and the dim murmurings of hagiographers, critics, and journalists as they establish a consensus of approval for the inexcusable (and presumably gain materially for so doing).

Architecture, a public art, matters to us all. Questioning its qualities should not be the preserve of a small coterie of self-appointed professionals, propped up by pseudoscience and browbeating any dissent. Real scientists should start to examine the claims of starchitects and their followers—probing, dissecting, and then demolishing the pretensions, obfuscatory language, and arrogant disregard of everything except celebrity and money that are characteristics of this group. Since the modernist movement gained control, chaos has been produced where once was order. That state of affairs is revealed in my book. Salingaros and other perceptive critics, such as Frank Albo, Anthony Daniels, Graham Cunningham, Roger Scruton, Emil Adamec, and the late David Watkin, who troubled to read what I wrote, fully understood. And I do not think there is much chance of reforming architectural education; all that will come is more of the same. Salingaros rightly exposes the empty claims behind so-called scientific modernism and much else in his review. Having experienced the system myself, I now think that all architectural schools should be shut down, because they are not producing graduates capable of individual thought, or encouraging the skills of healthy debate and analysis. Students are forced to conform to the prejudices of largely uneducated tutors, otherwise they do not graduate. That is a disgraceful state of affairs, yet another example of the infantilisation of society.

I fully expected that the architectural establishment and its dismal hangers-on in the media would attack my work, as I exposed the bogusness of everything their vested interests are built upon. Nevertheless, there is no evidence those attackers bothered to actually read what I had written. The insults, put-downs, and the viciousness of their effusions amply demonstrate that I touched a very raw, even diseased, nerve. To a reader versed in real science, such a reaction will be surprising, as some of those attacks were launched from the intellectually empty, official organ of party-political correctness peddled in the marble halls of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Ludicrous claims that the modernist movement in architecture was an inevitable, logical evolution from the Arts and Crafts movement, as energetically promoted by the chief Gropius-worshipper, Nikolaus Pevsner, notably in his book Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius,⁵ were forensically examined and dismissed in my book. The outraged objections of Arts and Crafts practitioners, such as Scott and Voysey, to Pevsner’s claims were quoted at length by me. Yet believers continue to accept the Gospel according to Saint Nikolaus, who simply ignored the views of those creative architects who were uncorrupted by modernism. Pevsner’s work is akin to Holy Writ in certain circles. As I have pointed out, the modernist movement is a pseudo-religious cult that brooks no dissent: indeed, it has parallels in seventeenth-century hysteria concerning witches. And to judge from the self-righteous vilification poured on my head for daring to examine the unsafe foundations of modernism, I am now a target for the modernist inquisition to anathematise and abuse. Had Morris been still alive when Pevsner linked his name with Gropius’s, there would have been outrage, and hell to pay.

I sincerely hope those capable of clear thought will look around them and see the awful mess that has been made of the world. I appeal to the world of real science, to join in and help to expose what has been a catastrophe for us all.

James Stevens Curl

Nikos Salingaros replies:

In responding to a response, perhaps the most useful thing I can do is to situate this topic in its widest context. Readers coming from the scientific community must be puzzled about the architectural debate put forward in Professor James Stevens Curl’s book Making Dystopia, and the subsequent controversy it provoked.⁶ Why should scientifically literate persons care about the shape of the built environment? I can list several reasons why good architecture matters.

1. Traditional architectures manifest specific ordering principles that we have internalized through our evolution.⁷
2. Those ordering principles organize informational complexity, and our sensory mechanisms of spatial perception are tuned to respond to them.⁸
3. More than contributing to mental and physiological well-being in adults, special informational complexity is essential for children’s development and intelligence.⁹

Throughout human existence, we built our environment so as to adapt it to our sensibilities—until the 1920s. Starting then, architects ignored the innate need for adapting artificial structures to our biology. They used their intuition in a negative sense, reversing preferences for neural responses we normally crave from structures.¹⁰

Curl documents the history of how a pseudo-religious cult took over the mainstream architecture profession, which it continues to control and dominate. He also exposes the vast supporting infrastructure that maintains the cult’s ideology and its acolytes in power. It is indeed a ruthless power game, involving entrenched interests in academia and the media, fueled by a trillion-dollar global construction industry. Builders and developers may not care about human evolution, or cult ideology, but they find non-adaptive design and planning typologies convenient and highly profitable. Money talks, and when an industry is married to a cult movement, self-serving voices sound loudest in the media.

The society of spectacle driven by propaganda is exposed, with copious accompanying documentation, in Curl’s Making Dystopia. A new industrialized culture alienates humanity from the natural world, and from human nature. Architecture is merely the victim—and not the only one—of this general phenomenon. Yet I cannot blame a perplexed reader who counters even those well-reasoned arguments with common-sense doubts.

• How can a global building industry shape our buildings, urban spaces, and cities into environments perceived by many as inhuman, when science knows of a healing environmental geometry?¹¹
• Surely a developed, industrialized country such as Germany has good reason to officially celebrate the Bauhaus centenary this year, and would not do so if those original designers were actually a group of fanatical eccentrics?¹²
• Even if the universally applied design principles of the modern movement in architecture had dubious origins,¹³ our modern society is now shaped according to those established typologies. Would not government bodies and scientific culture have identified and stopped implementations with possibly harmful consequences for human health and wellbeing?

There are simply too many vested interests at stake. There is too much entrenched power; too many persons making a living by belonging to the system; generations of architects who have been conditioned in architecture school to support the cult of non-adaptive design;¹⁴ too many sycophantic academics who have been promoted to tenured positions; too much legitimate profit to be made by speculative construction; too much money generated by an illicit global economy that desperately needs laundering through construction projects.¹⁵ These pressures have made society’s watchdogs ineffective, turning them into faithful mouthpieces of dominant architectural culture.

But even if all of this is true, why should scientists care about architecture? First, because it affects themselves and their families directly. Second, because the architectural cult is dangerously anti-science and anti-evidence.¹⁶ This leads sensitive, thinking individuals into cognitive dissonance, a painful condition from which the only cure is to accept the status quo, even if that means denying one’s own intuition and body signals.¹⁷ Apparently, the prize-winning building that makes you feel sick is supposed to be an architectural masterpiece and you are just too ignorant to appreciate it. What else can one do besides deny one’s intuition when a head of state hosts a famous starchitect—someone that Curl and I might consider singularly deficient in architectural ability—at the presidential mansion? Or when media hype promotes the yearly Pritzker Prize, which cult supporters proclaim to be the “Nobel Prize for Architecture”? It is not. And, regrettably, most laureates choose to produce work that is neither adaptive nor contextual. The only international prize modeled after the Nobel Prizes happens to be the Stockholm Culture Award, and I was the grateful recipient of its 2019 Architecture Prize for establishing a mathematical theory of architecture.

In conclusion, a serious challenge has been thrown to our complacent society to consider the very real dangers posed by dominant architectural culture. The threat is an existential one, because it involves not only human health but also unexplored questions regarding the effects of environmental stress on fecundity, pregnancy, and children’s intellectual development. Those frightening possibilities have been totally ignored while cult dominance has been allowed to grow and permeate the globe. Let us hope that the world hears the wake-up call courageously launched by Curl in Making Dystopia. We need to “build good” in the precise scientific sense of creating healing environments, and not abstract artworks.