Twentieth-Century Architecture as a Cult

by Nikos Salingaros (March 2019)

Broken Brutalism I, Mandy Payne, 2015

New preface to this essay

When this essay first appeared it created—and continues to create—very hostile reactions from the dominant architectural culture. I stated what I thought was obvious, but it disturbed many of those who had gone through architecture school. Nevertheless, many people from both inside and outside academia and the profession found it thought-provoking. One eminent architectural historian, James Stevens Curl, liked it enough that he wrote the Foreword to my book Anti-architecture and Deconstruction, within which this article is included as a chapter.

Making Dystopia has now hit the world like a bombshell. In it, Professor Curl documents how a strange type of inhuman and non-adaptive architecture came to take over building activity following World War I, and then to completely dominate the profession after World War II. He has found a use for the cult thesis to explain the remarkable tenacity of this movement, and also how and why it took possession of architecture schools all over the world.

In light of recent events, especially considering the furor that Making Dystopia has provoked (and which is building up into a genuine architectural revolution), it might be good to have this essay widely available. It would appear—and I truly hope it is true this time around—that public reaction against the dismal qualities of officially promoted architecture has reached a tipping point. I am very happy to offer this essay separately from my book Anti-architecture and Deconstruction, which, of course, remains available in several languages.

1. Introduction

How does the architectural profession so successfully repel attempts at reform? I believe that the answer is to be found in a system phenomenon. Architecture is a cult, and the last thing a cult wants is to be transformed into a proper scientific discipline. The reason is that the two types of system have very different internal structures, which in turn generate a form for the controlling power structure. There is no smooth transition from a cult to a discipline based on logical precepts.

Architecture is not set up to be stable to received input in the same way that science is. In science, there exists large-scale and long-term systemic stability. By contrast, contemporary architecture, like any other belief system not founded on rationality and experiment, is susceptible to catastrophic system collapse because it cannot tolerate minor changes.

The moment when society decides to abandon architecture as a cult, and replace it with architecture as a field based on logical reflection, the present architectural power structure will cease to exist. A new power structure composed of new people will be supported by a new educational system. Establishment architects realize that their continued prosperity depends on prolonging the current system, and are doing a marvelous job of reinforcing its hold on society.

2. Defining a Cult

A system may be identified as a dangerous cult if it has the following characteristics, combining aims with techniques:

It aims to destroy
It isolates its members from the world
It claims special knowledge and morality
It demands strict obedience
It applies brainwashing
It has an auto-referential philosophy
It creates its own language, incomprehensible to outsiders

I will show here that contemporary architecture satisfies these criteria.

3. Architecture and Cults

From this, it is not surprising that architecture misused the workings of religion to further itself.

followed a cult structure. Walter Gropius established a strict, authoritarian cult regime for resident Bauhaus students. Johannes Itten, a follower of a cultish offshoot of the Mazdaist (Zoroastrian) religion, indoctrinated Bauhaus students into its mystical practices. Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Theo van Doesburg (all Bauhaus teachers at some point) belonged to the Theosophist movement led by Helena Blavatsky. They subscribed to the mystical cosmology of fellow Theosophist Dr. M. Schoenmackers, whose astrological theories compelled that only the primary colors yellow, blue and red could be used.

It is irrelevant whether the spiritual groups mentioned above represented beneficial, benign, or harmful cults. Cult methods were applied to make architecture into a new cult, and an extremely dangerous one because of its virulence and destructive aims. A key aspect of modernism was an absolute belief in the necessity of eliminating all pre-modernist architecture.

The point where architecture turned into a cult can be identified with the abandonment of traditional building culture. Like science, architecture has a vast store of practical knowledge and technical skills that one needs to master before making original contributions. By throwing all of that away, the modernists could offer instant gratification to those who joined the cult. They attracted followers using the myth of the creative genius. Young architects still had to train for several years, but their time was spent very differently. Instead of learning and absorbing a core body of knowledge, they trained for allegiance to the architectural cult.

4. Brainwashing

—starting from zero“. Its aim was a radical restructuring of human consciousness. Every incoming student was subjected to intense psychological conditioning designed to cleanse every preconception regarding architecture, so as to re-wire the student’s neuronal circuits.

5. The Cult of Deconstructivism

In a devastating hoax, the two physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont have exposed some of the most prominent French deconstructivist philosophers as charlatans.

Charlatans are not protected in the scientific world. The society of their peers would expel them from positions where they could continue to do harm. Science needs to protect its foundation more than its individual members, something that will not occur in a power-driven discipline that lacks a scientific basis. In the architectural arena, deconstructivists are unassailable because the discipline is based largely on cult beliefs. Those who use deconstructivist philosophy to justify their bizarre constructions are now at the top of their profession.

The deconstructivist agenda is to destroy the logical foundations of knowledge and reasoning, in a way that would make it impossible to reconstruct it afterwards. For deconstructivist architects, there is no more utopia, only nihilism.

6. Architectural Cult Symbols

without returning to the ordered complexity of traditional architecture—is to destroy forms altogether. Because modernism as a thought system denies organized complexity, it could only evolve into disorganized complexity.

7. The Solution

Farsi, French, Italian, Russian, and Spanish.

Bibliography

James Stevens Curl (2018) Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism, Oxford University Press.

— Review by Theodore Dalrymple, New English Review, 1 October 2018.

— David Brussat discusses a review by Witold Rybczynski, New English Review, 15 February 2019.

— A list of reviews of Making Dystopia is kept updated by David Brussat, Architecture Here and There.

Cognitive Dissonance and Non-adaptive Architecture: Seven Tactics for Denying the Truth“, Doxa, Issue 11, pages 100-117.
Nikos Salingaros (2017) “What Architectural Education Does To Would-Be Architects“, Common Edge, 8 June 2017.

Fashionable Nonsense, Picador, New York. European title: Intellectual Impostures.

«Previous Article Home Page Next Article»

__________________________________

Nikos Angelos Salingaros, PhD is an internationally recognized Urbanist and Architectural Theorist. Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas at San Antonio, he has held guest professorships in Architecture at the Delft University of Technology, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Querétaro, Mexico, and Università di Roma III. His books Algorithmic Sustainable Design, Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction, A Theory of Architecture, Design for a Living Planet, Biophilia and Healing Environments, Principles of Urban Structure, and Unified Architectural Theory are translated into many languages.

Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast