MODERNISTS AGAINST PROGRESS.(school design)(Brief Article)

Our great-grandparents, who lived in a far less affluent society, put up public buildings--courthouses, libraries, banks, schools--that spoke meaningfully to people of all ages. That's because they used the vocabularies, patterns, and rhythms of traditional architecture to inform everybody where their culture came from and what it represented.

Greco-Roman architecture in particular was used widely in nineteenth-century America in institutional buildings. The three-part divisions of Greco-Roman buildings expressed a "top, middle, and bottom," which are analogous of course to a head, body, and foot of the human figure. Greco-Roman architecture and all its emulations were therefore inherently humanistic. This is not a "style" issue. All classical architectures, across different cultures, share this characteristic. It represents human self-knowledge painfully acquired over centuries.

The late twentieth century brought a dreadful break in continuity for architectural design. We took centuries of hard-won design wisdom--a whole set of skills, principles, techniques, and attitudes about placemaking--and tossed them in the dumpster, replacing them with Modernist abstractions. We threw it all away in order to be stylish, to be cutting edge, to be "cool" Modernists. The irony is, Modernism has now collapsed into the abyss.

I show slides in my lectures of modern school buildings, for instance, that are so horrible they look like maximum security prisons. In their design they give the overt impression that school is punishment. It ought not be any surprise that learning does not occur in these environments. We ought to be deeply ashamed of such buildings.

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