Worth Reading
The Brutalist Strain” in Taki’s Magazine
The Greeks and the Romans set the standard for architecture. They created buildings that were not only beautiful but functional, and they built them to last. Renaissance and Baroque architects elaborated on the classical principles and produced some impressive buildings. And for the following several hundred years, all the new “schools” of architecture were insignificant takeoffs.
But in the modern era, something terrible happened in architecture that has only gotten worse over the years. The telos of the field shifted from what is good for the user to what will make the architect more important. The result was all the bastardized, impractical, and ephemeral crap that has come into prominence since then. Among the worst was the so-called Brutalist school of architecture. In this essay, Theodore Dalrymple takes on the defenders of this indefensible genre.