Seeing Like a State, Chapter 4

 

Summary of Chapter 4: The High-Modernist City: An Experiment and a Critique

This chapter joins into the eternally popular and rewarding practice of bashing Le Corbusier, followed by an appreciation of the work of Jane Jacobs. Visits to Brasília and Chandigarh illustrate the failings of High Modernist city planning. Scott begins with an opening quote from Mumford about Baroque planning not being amenable to change, and so having to be done at one stroke by an despotic ruler. Scott applies the criticism to “the embodiment of high-modernist urban design,” Le Corbusier (103). Most of his plans were never built, because “they typically required a political resolve and financial wherewithal that few political authorities could muster.” When such planned cities were built, they required autocratic state power, just as Mumford predicted.Scott notes:

These urban planners backed by state power are rather like tailors who are not only free to invent whatever suit of clothes they wish but also free to trim the customer so that he fits the measure. (146)

If one were looking for a caricature—a Colonel Blimp, as it were, of modernist urbanism—one could hardly do better than to invent Le Corbusier. (104)

Though some of Le Corbusier’s early creations are actually quite decent, the LeC we are taking issue with is the author of La ville radieuse. “Here as elsewhere, Le Corbusier’s plans were self-consciously immodest.”

No compromise is made with the preexisting city; the new cityscape completely supplants its predecessor. In each case, the new city has striking sculptural properties; it is designed to make a powerful visual impact as a form. That impact, it is worth noting, can be had only from a great distance.

None of the plans makes any reference to the urban history, traditions, or aesthetic tastes of the place in which it is to be located. The cities depicted, however striking, betray no context; in their neutrality, they could be anywhere at all.

Le Corbusier had no patience for the physical environment that centuries of urban living had created. He heaped scorn on the tangle, darkness, and disorder, the crowded and pestilential conditions, of Paris and other European cities at the turn of the century. (106)

Scott notes the romance of the modernist architect and the airplane, illustrated with a lengthy quote from Le C on the “bird’s-eye view” (381n7).

Formal, geometric simplicity and functional efficiency were not two distinct goals to be balanced; on the contrary, formal order was a precondition of efficiency. Le Corbusier set himself the task of inventing the ideal industrial city, in which the ‘general truths’ behind the machine age would be expressed with graphic simplicity. The rigor and unity of this ideal city required that it make as few concessions as possible to the history of existing cities.

Le C had a deep dislike of complexity; he believed that that straight lines and right angles are more rational and “geometric” than organic or rounded forms, but as Scott points out, this is not true. Scott describes Le C’s infamous concept of the “death of the street,” which is linked to the fetishization of zoning, per which each district of the city to have one and only one function.

The logic of this rigid segregation of functions is perfectly clear. It is far easier to plan an urban zone if it has just one purpose. It is far easier to plan the circulation of pedestrians if they do not have to compete with automobiles and trains. It is far easier to plan a forest if its sole purpose is to maximize the yield of furniture-grade timber. When two purposes must be served by a single facility or plan, the trade-offs become nettlesome. When several or many purposes must be considered, the variables that the planner must juggle begin to boggle the mind. (110)

If the only function of roads is to get automobiles from A to B quickly and economically, then one can compare two road plans in terms of relative efficiency. This logic is eminently reasonable inasmuch as this is precisely what we have in mind when we build a road from A to B. Notice, however, that the clarity is achieved by bracketing the many other purposes that we may want roads to serve, such as affording the leisure of a touristic drive, providing aesthetic beauty or visual interest, or enabling the transfer of heavy goods.

In the case of the places that people call home, narrow criteria of efficiency do considerably greater violence to human practice.

...what is going on in the kitchen when someone is cooking for friends who have gathered there is not merely ‘food preparation.’ But the logic of efficient planning from above for large populations requires that each of the values being maximized be sharply specified and that the number of values being maximized simultaneously be sharply restricted-preferably to a single value. The logic of Le Corbusier’s doctrine was to carefully delineate urban space by use and function so that single-purpose planning and standardization were possible. (111)

Le C’s first “principle of urbanism” was “The Plan: Dictator.” “He returned repeatedly to the contrast between the existing city, which is the product of historical chance, and the city of the future, which would be consciously designed from start to finish following scientific principles.” Le C’s city is to be “monocephalic.”

The scientific urban planner is to the design and construction of the city as the entrepreneur-engineer is to the design and construction of the factory. Just as a single brain plans the city and the factory, so a single brain directs its activity—from the factory’s office and from the city’s business center. The hierarchy doesn’t stop there. The city is the brain of the whole society. (112)

Scott compares this view to Plato’s in The Laws (382n28). He also notes the resonance with the career of Walter Christaller, the inventor of central place theory, whose “search for the autocrat who will give him the power to realize his vision” led him to court first the Nazis, then the German Communist Party, in “a classic case of the attempt to impose what had begun as a simplified analytical description of the economics of location” (382-3n29).

Le C’s had a typical high modernist faith in “universal scientific truths”; his vision of the Plan as despot has resonances with modern technofetishism.

The wisdom of the plan sweeps away all social obstacles: the elected authorities, the voting public, the constitution, and the legal structure. At the very least, we are in the presence of a dictatorship of the planner; at most, we approach a cult of power and remorselessness that is reminiscent of fascist imagery. (113)

Technocracy, in this instance, is the belief that the human problem of urban design has a unique solution, which an expert can discover and execute. Deciding such technical matters by politics and bargaining would lead to the wrong solution. As there is a single, true answer to the problem of planning the modern city, no compromises are possible.

Believing that his revolutionary urban planning expressed universal scientific truths, Le Corbusier naturally assumed that the public, once they understood this logic, would embrace his plan. The original manifesto of CIAM called for primary school students to be taught the elementary principles of scientific housing: the importance of sunlight and fresh air to health; the rudiments of electricity, heat, lighting, and sound; the right principles of furniture design; and so on. These were matters of science, not of taste; instruction would create, in time, a clientele worthy of the scientific architect. Whereas the scientific forester could, as it were, go right to work on the forest and shape it to his plan, the scientific architect was obliged to first train a new clientele that would ‘freely’ choose the urban life that Le Corbusier had planned for them. (114)

An extended discussion of Brasília (117ff) serves as an example of the design and failings of the High Modernist city. Though not designed by Le C himself, its planners were clearly inspired by his thinking, and there is also a handy book which Scott draws on extensivly (James Holston, (1989) The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília . Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Brasília is in several ways “the negation or transcendance of Brazil” and its culture.

Brasília was designed to eliminate the street and the square as places for public life. Although the elimination of local barrio loyalties and rivalries may not have been planned, they were also a casualty of the new city. (120)

The goal was to replace the public squares and crowded “corridor” streets of traditional Brazilian cities:

the square, as a confluence of streets and a sharply enclosed, framed space, become what Holston aptly calls a ‘public visiting room.’ As a public room, the square is distinguished by its accessibility to all social classes and the great variety of activities it accommodates. Barring state proscriptions, it is a flexible space that enables those who use it to use it for their mutual purposes. The square or the busy street attracts a crowd precisely because it provides an animated scene—a scene in which thousands of unplanned, informal, improvised encounters can take place simultaneously... It goes without saying that the street or the public square, under the right circumstances, could also become the site of public demonstrations and riots directed against the state. (120-1)

Scott inserts a relevant quote from Le C: “Cafes and places of recreation will no longer be the fungus which eats up the pavements of Paris. We must kill the street” (385n60). The massive central square of Brasília is not at all like the human-scale public squares of the past:

If one were to arrange to meet a friend there, it would be rather like trying to meet someone in the middle of the Gobi desert. And if one did meet up with one’s friend, there would be nothing to do. Functional simplification demands that the rationale for the square as a public visiting room be designed out of Brasília. This plaza is a symbolic center for the state; the only activity that goes on around it is the work of the ministries. (121)

The functional division of the city means everyone must drive everywhere, from home, to work, to commercial centers, etc.

One striking result of Brasília’s cityscape is that virtually all the public spaces in the city are officially designated public spaces: the stadium, the theater, the concert hall, the planned restaurants. The smaller, unstructured, informal public spaces—sidewalk cafes, street corners, small parks, neighborhood squares—do not exist. Paradoxically, a great deal of nominally open space characterizes this city, as it does Le Corbusier’s city plans. But that space tends to be ‘dead’ space, as in the Plaza of the Three Powers.

[This is readily confirmed with Google streetview; looking around the wide open spaces in the middle of Brasília, the only people I could find in any of the parks were three guys maintaining shrubbery]

There were definite advantages to beginning with an empty, bulldozed site belonging to the state. At least the problems of land speculation, rent gouging, and property-based inequalities that beset most planners could be circumvented. As with Le Corbusier and Haussmann, there was an emancipating vision here. The best and most current architectural knowledge about sanitation, education, health, and recreation could be made part of the design. Twenty-five square meters of green space per resident reached the UNESCO-designed ideal. (125)

Virtually all the needs of Brasília's future residents were reflected in the plan. It is just that these needs were the same abstract, schematic needs that produced the formulas for Le Corbusier’s plans. Although it was surely a rational, healthy, rather egalitarian, state-created city, its plans made not the slightest concession to the desires, history, and practices of its residents. In some important respects, Brasília is to São Paulo or Rio as scientific forestry is to the unplanned forest. Both plans are highly legible, planned simplifications devised to create an efficient order that can be monitored and directed from above. Both plans, as we shall see, miscarry in comparable respects.

it is almost as if the founders of Brasília, rather than having planned a city, have actually planned to prevent a city. (126)

Residents complain of brasilite, aka Brasília-itis.

The recipe for high-modernist urban planning, while it may have created formal order and functional segregation, did so at the cost of a sensorily impoverished and monotonous environment—an environment that inevitably took its toll on the spirits of its residents.

Holston asked a class of nine-year- old children, most of whom lived in superquadra, to draw a picture of ‘home.’ Not one drew an apartment building of any kind. All drew, instead, a traditional freestanding house with windows, a central door, and a pitched roof. (127)

The disorienting quality of Brasília is exacerbated by architectural repetition and uniformity. Here is a case where what seems like rationality and legibility to those working in administration and urban services seems like mystifying disorder for the ordinary residents who must navigate the city.

Scott turns to some of the unplanned elements which in the end shaped Brasília otherwise than it had been planned; particularly the role of the army of “candango” workers/squatters who built the city, who organize and get political power. In the end there are both rich and poor unplanned Brasílias, alongside the planned areas.

The unplanned Brasílias—that of the rich and that of the poor—were not merely a footnote or an accident; one could say that the cost of this kind of order and legibility at the center of the plan virtually required that it be sustained by an unplanned Brasília at the margins. The two Brasílias were not just different; they were symbiotic. (130)

This is because it was the political necessities of building Brasília in an autocratic manner, that, ironically, required some influence to be ceded to these competing power bases.

How successful was Brasília as a high-modernist, utopian space? If we judge it by the degree to which it departs from cities in older, urban Brazil, then its success was considerable. If we judge it by its capacity either to transform the rest of Brazil or to inspire a love of the new way of life, then its success was minimal. The real Brasília, as opposed to the hypothetical Brasília in the planning documents, was greatly marked by resistance, subversion, and political calculation.

Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh, treated on pages 130-2, reveals essentially all the same problems. The rest of the chapter focuses on the trenchant critique of high modernist planning offered by Jane Jacobs (132ff). In contrast to Le C, Jacobs gives a bottom-up view starting from the street level experience of pedestrians; she will “argue from close daily observation at street level rather than stipulating human wishes from above” (140).

A formative insight in Jacobs’s argument is that there is no necessary correspondence between the tidy look of geometric order on one hand and systems that effectively meet daily needs on the other. Why should we expect, she asks, that well-functioning built environments or social arrangements will satisfy purely visual notions of order and regularity? (133)

A fundamental mistake that urban planners made, Jacobs claims, was to infer functional order from the duplication and regimentation of building forms: that is, from purely visual order. Most complex systems, on the contrary, do not display a surface regularity; their order must be sought at a deeper level.

Scott characterizes Jacobs as a “functionalist” in contrast to Le C’s aesthetic approach. Jacobs writes on the true sources of social order, e.g., “eyes on the street.” S adds in a footnote:

It is important to specify that Jacobs’s point about ‘eyes on the street’ assumes a rudimentary level of community feeling. If the eyes on the street are hostile to some or all members of the community, as Talja Potters has reminded me, public security is not enhanced. (386n85)

[To this could be added the question, of course, security for whom? There might be some “functionalist” assumptions about “order” to be unpacked here].

The process is powerfully cumulative. The more animated and busier the street, the more interesting it is to watch and observe; all these unpaid observers who have some familiarity with the neighborhood provide willing, informed surveillance. (135)

People in Jacobs’ city are on “sidewalk terms” with each other (136). S notes in a footnote how many of Jacobs’ examples involve “the fast-disappearing and much maligned petite bourgeoisie” (386n86) [a clue to one of Scott’s differences from Marxism].

The web of familiarity and acquaintanceship enabled a host of crucial but often invisible public amenities. A person didn’t think twice about asking someone to hold one’s seat at the theater, to watch a child while one goes to the restroom, or to keep an eye on a bike while one ducks into a deli to buy a sandwich.

The agents of this order are all nonspecialists whose main business is something else. There are no formal public or voluntary organizations of urban order here—no police, no private guards or neighborhood watch, no formal meetings or officeholders. Instead, the order is embedded in the logic of daily practice. What’s more, Jacobs argues, the formal public institutions of order function successfully only when they are undergirded by this rich, informal public life. An urban space where the police are the sole agents of order is a very dangerous place. (136)

Diversity, cross-use, and complexity (both social and architectural) are Jacobs’s watchwords. The mingling of residences with shopping areas and workplaces makes a neighborhood more interesting, more convenient, and more desirable—qualities that draw the foot traffic that in turn makes the streets relatively safe. (136-7)

What are the conditions of this diversity? That a district have mixed primary uses, Jacobs suggests, is the most vital factor. Streets and blocks should be short in order to avoid creating long barriers to pedestrians and commerce. Buildings should ideally be of greatly varying age and condition, thereby making possible different rental terms and the varied uses that accompany them. Each of these conditions, not surprisingly, violates one or more of the working assumptions of orthodox urban planners of the day: single-use districts, long streets, and architectural uniformity. (137)

“The very jumble of activities, buildings, and people—the apparent disorder that offended the aesthetic eye of the planner—was for Jacobs the sign of dynamic vitality.” Scott adds what he considers a “larger argument” to Jacobs’ case for cross-use and diversity:

Like the diverse old-growth forest, a richly differentiated neighborhood with many kinds of shops, entertainment centers, services, housing options, and public spaces is, virtually by definition, a more resilient and durable neighborhood. Economically, the diversity of its commercial ‘bets’ (everything from funeral parlors and public services to grocery stores and bars) makes it less vulnerable to economic downturns. At the same time its diversity provides many opportunities for economic growth in upturns. Like monocropped forests, single-purpose districts, although they may initially catch a boom, are especially susceptible to stress. The diverse neighborhood is more sustainable. (138)

Scott avers that Jacobs contributes a “woman’s eye,” more attentive and insightful than male colleagues of the time, allowing “her realization that a great deal of human activity (including, by all means, work) is pursued for a wide range of goals and satisfactions” (139). She characterizes “authoritarian planning as urban taxidermy” (139ff). A note explores links between Jacobs and anarchist precursors such as Goodman:

The echoes of such influential anarchist thinkers as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Peter Kropotkin reverberate in this passage. I do not know whether Jacobs intended these resonances, which may have come from the work of Paul Goodman. But what is missing is a recognition that, in the absence of state-based urban planning, large commercial and speculative interests are transforming the urban landscape every day. The effect of her argument is to ‘naturalize’ the unplanned city by treating it as the consequence of thousands of small and notionally equal acts. (387n99)

Scott discusses how urban planning parallels “optimum control theory” in forest planning, providing an example of planning for a shopping center’s catchment zone. “Rigid, single-use zoning is, then, not just an aesthetic measure. It is an indispensable aid to scientific planning, and it can also be used to transform formulas posing as observations into self-fulfilling prophesies” (141).

If the planning authority does not need to make concessions to popular desires, the one-size-fits-all solution is likely to prevail. (142)

The historic diversity of the city—the source of its value and magnetism—is an unplanned creation of many hands and long historical practice. Most cities are the outcome, the vector sum, of innumerable small acts bearing no discernible overall intention.

He quotes Jacobs to the above effect, and adds:

Le Corbusier would have agreed with this description of the existing city, and it was precisely what appalled him. It was just this cacophony of intentions that was responsible for the clutter, ugliness, disorder, and inefficiencies of the unplanned city.

They each have influenced different schools of thought in urban planning:

Whereas Le Corbusier’s planner is concerned with the overall form of the cityscape and its efficiency in moving people from point to point, Jacobs’s planner consciously makes room for the unexpected, small, informal, and even nonproductive human activities that constitute the vitality of the ‘lived city.’ (143)

Jacobs is also more aware of other urban processes: ecology, market effects, gentrification.

The nature of the city was flux and change; a successful neighborhood could not be frozen and preserved by the planners. A city that was extensively planned would inevitably diminish much of the diversity that is the hallmark of great towns. The best a planner can hope for is to modestly enhance rather than impede the development of urban complexity.

Scott approves of Jacobs’ (and later de Certeau’s) analogy of urban change with linguistic change, then in a footnote takes issue with Hayek’s similar claim to the self-organization of markets:

The problem that I see with this analogy is that the market in the modern sense is not synonymous with ‘spontaneous social order,’ but rather had to be imposed by a coercive state in the nineteenth century, as Karl Polanyi has convincingly shown. Hayek’s description of the development of common law is, I believe, somewhat closer to the mark. In any event, city, market, and common law are all creators of historical power relations that are neither ‘natural’ nor creative of ‘spontaneous social order.’ In her telling critique of planning, Jacobs is frequently tempted to naturalize the unplanned city rather as Hayek naturalizes the market. (388n106)

Like planned languages, planned cities need to be let loose to the transformative power of users: “Only time and the work of millions of its residents can turn these thin cities into thick cities” (144).

He discusses Jacobs’ laudable and prescient opposition to slum clearance, then notes more recent criticisms of Jacobs, but insists that “she has put her finger on the central flaws of hubris in high-modernist urban planning” (145). These flaws are, 1) “the presumption that planners can safely make most of the predictions about the future that their schemes require;” 2) the complex ways in which healthy neighborhoods and communities form cannot be reducible to formulae.

Smooth City, Chapter 2

Summary of Chapter 2: Smooth Structures

This chapter goes into more detailed discussion of the Reestraat and the redevelopment of King’s Cross Central in London, in order to illustrate the structures or “mechanisms” that produce and reproduce the “perfection” of the smooth city.

It is important to understand that the smooth city does not appear out of thin air, but is the result of all kinds of power structures, political impulses, planning processes, and design choices. (29)

One of these mechanisms is private ownership of land, and investment in redevelopment; this is tied to certain forms of state control and promotion, and results in a lack of certain [democratic mechanisms] to challenge planning and use. Together, local government and private property-holders exert a “matrix of control” (49), policing the use of space, and excluding undesirable or un-“smooth” populations, as well as unapproved practices such as loitering, putting up flyers, graffiti, etc. Boer emphasizes the role of privately-owned parks as a sort of pseudo-public space, where cryptic rules are enforced by private security guards. The generally unspoken but inferred scripts of acceptable and expected behavior in the smooth city are sometimes, in “awkward cases,” spelled out, as in a sign in King’s Cross Central commanding passersby to “Shop, Eat, Drink, Play” (52). “Smart city” policing, screening, and scripting dramatically reduce the unpredictability of encounters in the smooth city, as do the rise of delivery and e-hailing apps, which replace the chance of encounter with algorithmic manipulation, turning the smooth city into essentially the opposite of what the city has always been, and the opposite of what most urban enthusiasts and critics have tended to celebrate. However, this may very well appear “perfect” to those who can afford it, and who can follow the script.

B has some interesting passages on the way the smooth city interacts with history and place, through a sort of recasting and hollowing out – place names are preserved, as often are historic façades while the interiors are gutted and redesigned. [I was recently in just such a building in downtown Phoenix, across the street from the Footprint Center, the wind-rippled tile “skin” of which is a rare, actually beautiful (and presumably ecologically beneficial) example of contemporary architecture. Yet, much like with King’s Cross Central, a former industrial zone has been gutted and repurposed, to create a safe, smooth space for the “Shop, Eat, Drink, Play” set.] With an eye for material detail, B discusses the acid-cleaning of historical bricks, the replacement of older glass panels with up-to-date glass, and the transformation of Amsterdam streetscapes with new materials according to the rules of the “Puccini method” (24). He concludes with a discussion of how the production, maintenance, and replication of the smooth city is embedded in flows of capital, and how it relies on non-smooth or less-smooth spaces in which it exists in a hierarchy. Examples of these are the peripheral neighborhoods to which those displaced by gentrification have had to relocate; from these neighborhoods come the daily flux of workers who maintain, clean, and labor in the smooth city, and yet are excluded from local politics and decision making. This is true also on a global scale:

The complicated-looking intercom on the gasholder apartment building in King’s Cross Central was assembled in a factory near Shenzhen a few years ago, and will be disassembled by kids in the open wastelands near Accra a few years from now. (57)

The chapter also includes an inset of several pages of collages, using images presumably from the street spaces described, which highlight the attraction and repulsion exerted by the perfected/alienated space of the smooth city.

Smooth City, Chapter 1

 

René Boer (2023), Smooth City: Against Urban Perfection, Towards Collective Alternatives. Valiz, Amsterdam.

Summary of Chapter 1: Welcome to the Smooth City

In this brief introduction, Boer illustrates the “smooth city” with the example of Amsterdam’s Reestraat. He sets up a by now very familiar opposition between the homogenized, “perfect” and “safe” city produced by the process of “smoothening” which he will discuss, and the more interesting and diverse cities which the smooth city replaces, erases, or displaces – he cites several of the earlier authors in this discourse (Jacobs, Sennett, Debord, etc.). I say it is a familiar discourse (cf. the Hollow City, the Soft City, etc.), but this does not mean it is not still timely and relevant, and in need of a clear articulation of the current state and processes involved, and means of fighting back, which this book promises to discuss, in terms of queering and commoning. Boer invokes Benjamin and Lacis’s concept of porosity as a potential counterpoint to the smooth city; he also spends some time clarifying the difference between his concept of smoothness, and the “smooth space” discussed by Deleuze and Guattari.

Ruskin, The Nature of Gothic

John Ruskin (image from Wikimedia Commons)

John Ruskin (1900). The Nature of Gothic: A Chapter from the Stones of Venice. George Allen, London.

Summary:

Seeing as Cohen did not provide any definition of “Gothic,” in her discussion of Gothic Marxism, beyond a general suggestion of the noir, I thought I would turn to its most famous commentator, the fascinating and deeply problematic John Ruskin (Cohen does not cite Ruskin, and most likely did not have him in mind). It is of course somewhat anachronistic to try and modernize the political alignments of a person from another era, but Ruskin’s thoughts on the value of independence in labor can be read alongside, and contrasted to, such later arguments as the anarchist “abolition of work” argued for by Bob Black and others. Ruskin certainly had an influence on the anarchist and socialist tradition, as witnessed by the introduction to this volume, by William Morris; nevertheless he himself was, at least in this text, firmly conservative in the old sense of the term, pining for an idealized feudal order in which there is mutual respect up and down the rungs of a naturalized class hierarchy. Parts of his argument can also be read, somewhat against the grain though not completely, as an argument for a DIY punk aesthetic, along the lines of my (ahem) old band Yellow #5's aptly named 1987 debut album, Everybody Doing Their Own Shit At The Same Fucking Time.

Part of Ruskin’s charm, and his ability to write so many very long, multi-volumed books, is apparently his ability to go off on long tangents that would make Edward Gibbon envious. This chapter, from volume II of Ruskin’s three-volume survey of the architecture of Venice, starts off addressing the question of the form Gothic architecture took in Venice, leading to the question of how to define and evaluate Gothic in general; this leads on into discussions of the qualities of good art and architecture in general, on how and why architecture reflects the social order which produced it, and thus on the form of the ideal social order. That last topic is the one which has made this “chapter” (of 150 pages in the original text) so famous, and I read a version published as a separate book (though it was unfortunately lacking the plates, so I had to find and refer to a full copy of the Stones of Venice, anyway).

So: the question of Gothic architecture in Venice, leads to the question of how to define the Gothic in general; this is not just a question of various “Gothic” elements which may or may not be present, but of a unity they form; we all already have some idea of what we understand by “Gothic.” His plan is “tracing out this grey, shadowy, many-pinnacled image of the Gothic spirit within us” (3). If the reader has a different idea than Ruskin, “I do not ask him to accept, but only to examine and understand, my interpretation.”

Ruskin takes an approach akin in some ways to the “principles and elements” in discussing art: he focuses first on internal aspects (“certain mental tendencies of the builders”), before moving on the the mere external forms (arches, etc.)

Thus, the mental characteristics of Gothic, in order of importance: 

1. Savageness

2. Changefulness

3. Naturalism.

4. Grotesqueness.

5. Rigidity.

6. Redundance. (4)

Those are characters of the buildings themselves; to them correspond the following characters of the builders:

1. Savageness or Rudeness

2. Love of Change

3. Love of Nature

4. Disturbed Imagination

5. Obstinacy

6. Generosity

 In any given building, a few of these can be missing, but take away too many, it ceases to be “Gothic.”

I. Savageness

The name “Gothic” originated as a reproach for buildings with “a degree of sternness and rudeness” looked down on by commentators in the south (5). Should the name be replaced with something more fitting and respectable? No need, says R.

It is true, greatly and deeply true, that the architecture of the North is rude and wild but it is not true, that, for this reason, we are to condemn it, or despise. Far otherwise: I believe it is in this very character that it deserves our profoundest reverence.

He gives a highly poetical climate-based argument for cultural and artistic differences between northern and southern Europe; there is a “look of mountain brotherhood between the cathedral and the Alp” (8). But savegeness is even better if it reflects religion, not just climate – this is part of his deeply Christian analysis: what is key to the Gothic is that it reflects the Christian belief in the sanctity and equality of every soul.

This leads him into his most interesting argument. He distinguishes between servile, constitutional, and revolutionary traditions of architectural ornament. Servile ornament characterizes the schools of ancient Greece, Nineveh, and Egypt, who subordinated enslaved workmen to rigid rules, and confined creativity and artistry to the overseers [shades of Braverman]. Revolutionary or Renaissance ornament involves some kind of overskilling – every worker is equally schooled and skilled, but the result is that “his own original power is overwhelmed, and the whole building becomes a wearisome exhibition of well-educated imbecility” (9).

Constitutional ornament is the Gothic one, and it reflects a double aspect of Christian thought: first, that every soul is equally of value and not to be subordinated; second, that imperfection is inevitable. “That admission of lost power and fallen nature, which the Greek or Ninevite felt to be intensely painful, and, as far as might be, altogether refused, the Christian makes daily and hourly, contemplating the fact of it without fear, as tending, in the end, to God’s greater glory.” The Christian exhortation is thus, “Do what you can, and confess frankly what you are unable to do; neither let your effort be shortened for fear of failure, not your confession silenced for fear of shame.” Gothic schools of architecture thus “receive the results of the labour of inferior minds; and out of fragments full of imperfection, and betraying that imperfection in every touch, indulgently raise up a stately and unaccusable whole” (10). [It is not clear to me whether Ruskin would have been aware of the corollary concept of wabi-sabi in Japanese art.]

A desire for perfection should not lead us to “prefer the perfectness of the lower nature to the imperfection of the higher;” we are “not to set the meaner thing, in its narrow accomplishment, above the nobler thing, in its mighty progress; not to esteem smooth minuteness above shattered majesty; not to prefer mean victory to honourable defeat; not to lower the level of our aim, what we may more surely enjoy the complacency of success.”

In every manual laborer there are “some powers for better things,” some level of higher thought, which is not allowed to develop under the current system, in which they are made to act like machines.

Understand this clearly: You can teach a man to draw a straight line, and to cut one; to strike a curved line, and to carve it; and to copy and carve any number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect precision; and you find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool. (11)

[There is a lot to unpack in that; the assumption the worker is somehow asleep like an automaton, that has to awake into manhood [definitely this is more about “manhood” than “humanity?”] “You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both.” [Granted this is in the language of one upper-class person talking to another about the plebs below, but it still beats Taylorism.]

Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them.

“On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool.” Once he starts to imagine on his own, he loses his precision and becomes unreliable; “but out comes the whole majesty of him also; and we know the height of it only when we see the clouds settling upon him.” [So what exactly is this “majesty?” For Ruskin it seems to be the sovereignty of the free, Protestant, [male] individual.]

Ruskin argues that factory work is even more degrading and dehumanizing than slavery or feudal serfdom, on the familiar existentialist argument that even in slavery you can remain “in one sense, and the best sense, free” (12). His argument seems to be that even manual labor, done by hand, requires some intelligence, and thus allows the worker to develop their own intelligence, and thus be “free” in their minds, despite being enslaved. Factory work, in contrast, will “smother their souls with them,” and make their skin “into leathern thongs to yoke machinery with.” By being tied to, and thus dependent on, machinery, workers lose even their intelligence; the perfection of modern English products is a measure of this enslavement. In contrast, the imperfections of old Gothic architecture are “signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure; but which it must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to regain for her children.” (13)

[It seems R feels that subordination to machinery is more degrading than social subordination, even in such a condition as slavery. This can clearly be contrasted with Marx’s position in the Grundrisse; Marx agrees that automatic machinery reduces workers to “conscious linkages;” nevertheless what is most important is not the worker’s relation to technology, but the class relation that organizes production. R’s position in this light seems to be more in the line of “compassionate conservatism.”]

Ruskin is not against hierarchy, and feels that to “obey another man, to labour for him, yield reverence to him or to his place, is not slavery. It is often the best kind of liberty – liberty from care.” (13) The man who has to oversee others is the one with more “care” and worry. The current struggles of the 19th Century seem, to R, to be misdirected when they are simply against the wealthy upper class – instead of being against the division of labor per se, we should seek a more just division of labor, in which there is no such degrading labor as exists in factories. Back in feudal times, “the separation between the noble and the poor was merely a wall built by law; now it is a veritable difference in level of standing, a precipice between upper and lower grounds in the field of humanity...”

He goes through a sort of master-and-servant dialectic, which ends somewhat differently than Hegel’s, on the relation between the worker who “reverences” his master, and the master who shoulders all the burden of responsibility:

Which had, in reality, most of the serf nature in him – the Irish peasant who was lying in wait yesterday for his landlord, with his musket muzzle thrust through the ragged hedge; or that old mountain servant, who 200 years ago, at Inverkeithing, gave up his own life and the lives of his seven sons for his chief? – as each fell, calling forth his brother to the death, “Another for Hector!” (14) 

[The reference is to the history of Clan Maclean of Scotland. Perhaps it is not specifically English, but the nature of imperialism, to romanticize the peoples whom you have already colonized and beaten down, more than the ones who are still putting up resistance? The correct answer is that no, the Irish rebel has broken with any “serf mentality” the moment he took up his rifle, and is continuing the same battle against Cromwell, and all he stands for, that the seven Maclean brothers gave their lives in, back in 1651.]

So anyway, Ruskin feels that the current working class feels unthanked, their sacrifice in the factory is not honored like the reverent sacrifices of the past generations on battlefields, etc. In turn, the upper class folks who want to help should not teach or preach (presumably the standard attempts of the time; and still common today), since these are basically insulting the intelligence of workers; instead what is needed is a “right understanding, on the part of all classes, of what kinds of labor are good for men, raising them, and making them happy” (15), and centering the economy on this, giving up the forms of beauty, convenience, etc., which can only be gained by squeezing the life and soul out of workers. R suggests three “broad and simple rules:”

1. Never encourage the manufacture of any article not absolutely necessary, in the production of which Invention has no share.

2. Never demand an exact finish for its own sake, but only for some practical or noble end.

3. Never encourage imitation or copying of any kind, except for the sake of preserving records of great works. (15)

1. By “invention” he more specifically means inventiveness or creativity, on the part of the worker creating the product. His examples is the manufacture of glass beads, which are “utterly unnecessary” (16), and which involve mindless, repetitive labor. “And every young lady, therefore, who buys glass beads, is engaged in the slave-trade, and in a much more cruel one than that which we have so long been endeavoring to put down.” [the last bit there seems an unnecessary exaggeration. IIRC someone has made an argument somewhere that this frequent assertion in the 19^th century that factory labor is “worse than slavery” ultimately justified or normalized the existing slavery system.] However, glass cups or vessels can be “the subjects of exquisite invention,” and when we  buy and appreciate these, “we are doing good to humanity.” Similarly, wearing cut jewels merely for the sake of their value is wrong, but wearing fine gold jewelry which has been crafted by a skilled artisan is good.

[Ruskin can interestingly be linked to the current arguments for degrowth, on the shared point that we could do away with the production of a lot of useless and wasteful things (though his example is glass beads, not SUVs, etc.). This is also related to a problem with his argument for a return to an artisanal economy, namely that the exquisite glassware, etc. which we can keep can only be afforded by the wealthy, while the cheaper, “useless” decoration he wants us to give up, is that which the working class can afford.]

2. Ruskin is not against elegance and finish per se, just against it being prioritized over the freedom and thought of the creator. “If you are to have the thought of a rough and untaught man, you must have it ina  rough and untaught way .... Only get the thought and do not silence the peasant because he cannot speak good grammar, or until you have taught him his grammar.” (17) “So the rule is simple: always look for invention first, and after that, for such execution as will help the invention, and as the inventor is capable of without painful effort, and no more.”

He discusses the difference between English and old Venetian glass: the former is always precise, the latter cruder but also more inventive at its best: “Choose whether you will pay for the lovely form or the perfect finish, and choose at the same moment whether you will make the worker a man or a grindstone” (18).

He imagines an objection, that the talented craftsman should be promoted to overseer or designer, and have less talented workers under him, and so we can get “both design and finish.” R replies:

All ideas of this kind are founded upon two mistaken suppositions: the first, that one man’s thoughts can be, or ought to be, executed by another man’s hands; the second, that manual labor is a degradation, when it is governed by intellect. 

He defines large-scale architecture on this model as “the expression of the mind of manhood by the hands of childhood” [very much the Kantian “What is Enlightenment” here]. Starting to sound a bit more radical, he argues that the societal distinction between the gentleman thinker, and the working “operative” is a problem:

We are always in these days endeavoring to separate the two [thinking and working]; we want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense. (19)

Now it is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.

No master [or boss?] should be too proud to do the meanest or hardest work in their profession. So anyway, the rudeness indicated by the term “Gothic” should be seen as a good quality, not a reproachful one: “no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect” (20). [R’s theory of work and art are very appropriate to his own writing, because there is some beauty, depth, and insight there, that shines through a lot of crudeness and error.]

Ruskin now admits that his use of the terms “perfect” and “imperfect” so far has been inaccurate to his ends:

But, accurately speaking, no good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a misunderstanding of the ends of art.

This is for two reasons:

1) “...no great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure;” that is, the truly great artist is always pushing beyond what they can currently do, experimenting instead of staying inside what they can comfortably do, which itself would lead to relative mediocrity. If they strain to actually achieve perfection, they end like Leonardo, spending ten years on a painting, then leaving it unfinished to go on to new projects which will end the same way. The results will necessarily be beautiful but imperfect.

2) Imperfection is in fact essential to life, and is a sign of progress and change in all nature. He provides examples from the natural world: “to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality” (21).

II. Changefulness

From Savageness, he turns to the second quality of the Gothic, Changefulness, or Variety. This is a natural benefit of allowing  workers more freedom over their own work. He contrasts the regularity of a properly built neo-classical home, using the correct styles for Greek columns, etc, with buildings that can be read like poetry, because in addition to regularity, they have something else, variety.

The idea of reading a building as we would read Milton or Dante, and getting the same kind of delight out of the stones as out of the stanzas, never enters our mind for a moment” (23).  Architecture and every other art should say new things, not just repeat itself. 

Nothing is a great work of art, for the production of which either rules or models can be given. Exactly so far as architecture works on known rules, and from given models, it is not an art, but a manufacture... (24)

He turns to the superiority of a pointed over a round arch, as the former has infinite variability; ditto for grouped shafts and tracing in windows. There are, nevertheless, both healthy and “diseased” loves of change. He makes his appeal to nature (and music) for the distinction:  monotony and change are best experienced in alternation. The “diseased” love of change is when there is too much change, so it has become monotonous, and we seek “extreme and fantastic degrees of it” (27). Healthy love of change, acc R, led to the rise of Gothic, and diseased love of change led to its fall.

Monotony unbroken, like darkness, is painful (and even at its best it serves as a painful preparation or something for the relief of change): “...an architecture which is altogether monotonous is a dark or dead architecture; and of those who love it, it may be truly said, ‘they love darkness rather than light.’” Yet “transparent monotony” is a good use of monotony; “endurance” of monotony/darkness is a good quality of mind.

R starts off a great discussion of the superiority of the Gothic by observing that it is “not only the best, but the only rational architecture, as being that which can fit itself most easily to all services, vulgar or noble” (28). Because it is not dominated by a rigorous symmetry like Romanesque, etc., it can grow or shrink in width or breadth or function. Gothic builders never let ideas of “outside symmetries and consistencies to interfere with the real use and value of what they did.” [in contrast, the miserably boring uniform façades of many European squares comes to mind, particularly those celebrated by A.E.J. Morris.]

If they wanted a window, they opened one; a room, they added one; a buttress, they built one; utterly regardless of any established conventionalities of external appearance, knowing (as indeed it always happened) that such daring interruptions of the formal plan would rather give additional interest to symmetry than injure it. So that, in the best times of Gothic, a useless window would rather have been opened in an unexpected place for the sake of the surprise, than a useful one forbidden for the sake of symmetry. Every successive architect, employed upon a great work, built the pieces he added in his own way, utterly regardless of the style adopted by his predecessors; and if two towers were raised in nominal correspondence at the sides of a cathedral front, one was nearly sure to be different from the other, and in each the style at the top to be different from the style at the bottom. (28-9)

He gives religious import to the “confession of Imperfection” and the “confession of Desire of Change:” “If we pretend to have reached either perfection or satisfaction, we have degraded ourselves and our work.” [i.e., it would be hubris]

It is that strange disquietude of the Gothic spirit that is its greatness; that restlessness of the dreaming mind, that wanders hither and thither among the niches, and flickers feverishly around the pinnacles, and frets and fades in labyrinthine knots and shadows along wall and roof, and yet is not satisfied, nor shall be satisfied. (30)

III. Naturalism

He defines naturalism as “the love of natural objects for their own sake, and the effort to represent them frankly, unconstrained by artistical laws” (31) [this seems a problematic formulation]. “Naturalism” was sometimes used as a reproach in his day [in contrast to “Purism”], and he explains why, by distinguishing between composition (of colors, lines, etc.) and representation per se. “Now the noblest art is an exact unison of the abstract value, with the imitative power, of forms and colours. ... But the human mind cannot in general unite the two perfections; it either pursues the fact to the neglect of the composition, or pursues the composition to the neglect of the fact.” (32) Nevertheless, both of these serve their purposes, for communication, and for decoration. 

R says men are artistically divided into three “classes:” men of design, men of facts, and men of both. Each class has both healthy and unhealthy functions. The unhealthy forms are caused by despite or envy; errors on the side of design only cause inferior art, while errors on the side of facts produce idealogues who ruin everything.

Three more classes: good and evil are mixed in everything, yet one class seeks the good, one the evil, and the third perceives both. He calls these purists, sensualists, and naturalists, respectively.

He excoriates the sensualists at length, but more interesting is his criticism of the purists: “... this vulgar Purism, which rejects truth, not because it is vicious, but because it is humble, and consists not in choosing what is good, but in disguising what is rough, extends itself into every species of art. ... There is nothing, I believe, so vulgar, so hopeless, so indicative of an irretrievably base mind, as this species of Purism.” (44)

... the very becoming a Purist is commonly indicative of some slight degree of weakness, readiness to be offended, or narrowness of understanding of the ends of things: the greatest men being, in all times of art, Naturalists, without any exception... (45)

He recognizes in passing the ranty and digressive character of this 100+ page “chapter:”

the reader may already be somewhat wearied with a statement which has led us apparently so far from our immediate subject... (45) 

So anyway, the Gothic workman confesses his own imperfection (rudeness) and that of his subject (naturalism). On page 48, R comes out strongly against historicism in a footnote: “All good art representing past events, is therefore full of the most frank anachronism, and always ought to be. No painter has any business to be an antiquarian. We do not want his impressions or suppositions respecting things that are past. We want his clear assertions respecting things present.” (48)

[Well, Benjamin would have a response, that we can have both, that the image from the past can resonate with the present.]

He discusses Gothic vegetation, and how it is far more interested in the actual forms of real vegetation, than many older sculptural styles, which were content with very stylized vegetation as ornament. R links this to the rebirth of scientific inquiry at the close of the Middle Ages. He notes a theory that the Gothic developed out of imitation of nature; he points out this is historically inaccurate, the Gothic only developed to be closer to nature in its most mature form, but this itself reveals how central naturalism is to the “temper” of Gothic builders:

It was no chance suggestion of the form of an arch from the bending of a bough, but a gradual and continual discovery of beauty in natural forms which could be more and more perfectly transferred into those of stone, that influenced at once the heart of the people, and the form of the edifice. (50-1)

IV: The Grotesque.

R unfortunately declines to discuss this until the third volume, other than describing it as “the tendency to delight in fantastic and ludicrous, as well as in sublime, images.” (52).

V. Rigidity.

He immediately admits that the word “rigidity” is not really sufficient; “active rigidity” might be closer: “the peculiar energy which gives tension to movement, and stiffness to resistance.” [“Energetic” would perhaps be the best term]; he refers to the quality of Gothic architecture that uses tension to achieve lightness, instead of having stones just sitting on each other like southern architecture; and also how Gothic ornamentation does not simply sit on the walls but leaps forth, independently. R ties this to the need for people in northern climates to find joy in the cold season, as much as in the warm.

[This is of course belied by Moorish architecture, indeed, it has been argued, more recently, that Islamic and specifically Moorish architecture influenced Gothic.]

He emphasizes the importance of moderation: “The best Gothic building is not that which is most Gothic...” (55).

VI. Redundance

Last and least, Redundance, “the uncalculating bestowal of the wealth of its labour” (56). Instead of relying on elegance or economy, “a certain portion of their effect depends upon accumulation of ornament.”

For the very first requirement of Gothic architecture being, as we saw above, that  it shall both admit the aid, and appeal to the admiration, of the rudest as well as the most refined minds, the richness of the work is, paradoxical as the statement may appear, a part of its humility. No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple; which refuses to address the eye, except in a few clear and forceful lines; which implies, in offering so little to our regards, that all it has offered is perfect; and disdains, either by the complexity or the attractiveness of its features, to embarrass our investigation, or betray us into delight.

[Obviously, he would have some harsh words for modernist architecture.]

The inferior rank of the workman is often shown as much in the richness, as the roughness, of his work; and if the co-operation of every hand, and the sympathy of every heart, are to be received, we must be content to allow the redundance which disguises the failure of the feeble, and wins the regard of the inattentive.

[There is something in here, despite the classism carried over, regarding the way art could look in an anarchist society based on universal cooperation and sympathy; “failure” in the above just means not meeting certain elite standards or aesthetic expectations. What R is describing is how a more democratic, egalitarian work-process, reflecting a society of the same values, creates art with more “redundance,” or better put, variety of aesthetic judgments and innovations. This stands as a plausible response to Le Guin’s characterization of the anarchist society in The Dispossessed as being drab and uninterested in, or suspicious of, adornment; more likely, there would be greater diversity and “redundance” of artistic style, because there would no longer be any hierarchy of taste.] R then lists several interests in the Gothic “heart” which are quite relevant to this: “a magnificent enthusiasm, which feels as if it never could do enough to reach the fulness of its ideal; an unselfishness of sacrifice, which would rather cast fruitless labour before the altar than stand idle in the market; and finally, a profound sympathy with the fulness and wealth of the material universe...” (56-7). He goes on about the influence of nature on Gothic artists, that being influenced by nature they necessarily had no fear or revulsion of complexity or richness.

Having covered the six aspects of the inner spirit of Gothic, he turns to outward form. He reiterates that we can’t say that a building is or isn’t Gothic, only that it is more Gothic or less Gothic, depending on the extent to which it possesses those six aspects of inner spirit, and the elements of outward form which he will now enumerate.

He starts, naturally, with pointed arches, then turns to roof construction. Gabled roofs are even more important than pointed arches, being linked to the northern climate, and forming the basis of turret and spire, etc.

“It is not the compelled, but the willful transgression of law which corrupts the character. Sin is not in the act, but in the choice.” (59) This is his way of introducing the point that architects can stray from the rules of Gothic by necessity (shortage of room, etc.) and still be Gothic, it is when they do it willfully that they “sin.”

All of Gothic is developed from the relationship between the pointed arch for the bearing line below, and the gable for the protecting line above (62); he gives an illustration of this shape, basically the star trek insignia, but not off-center.

There are three ways of bridging space, with straight lintel, round arch, and angled gable; the Gothic “pointed arch” is properly speaking a rounded gable. All architectures of the world can be grouped by which means they use to bridge space. Examples: Greek, Romanesque, Gothic.

Per my above comment about Islamic architecture, R does mention a style he calls “Arabian Gothic” (as opposed to “pure Gothic”), of which he states that it “is called Gothic, only because it has many Gothic forms, pointed arches, vaults, etc., but its spirit remains Byzantine, more especially in the form of the roof-mask” (65) (i.e., with domes instead of gables).

Foliation is the inspiration for the trefoil arch, and for tracery: Gothic artists don’t necessarily try to imitate plants per se, but to reproduce their structural or geometrical beauty and the pleasure received from perceiving them.

He provides a final definition of Gothic based on physical characteristics: “Foliated architecture, which uses the pointed arch for the roof proper, and the gable for the roof-mask” (72).

There is now only one point more which he wishes to make, regarding foliation and sculpture, and the highest or purest form of Gothic, versus its final degraded forms. Early Gothic was “noble, inventive, and progressive,” whereas late Gothic was “ignoble, uninventive, and declining” (73) due to how they use foliation and figure sculpture.

He distinguishes between two styles he calls linear and surface Gothic; R gives two examples, one a gable from Abbeville, France, illustrating linear gothic; and the other from Verona, Italy, illustrating surface Gothic. R notes that the Italian example he has provided appears to have been executed less skillfully or expertly, yet this is not important: “The Veronese Gothic is strong in its masonry, simple in its masses, but perpetual in its variety. The late French Gothic is weak in masonry, broken in mass, and repeats the same idea continually. It is very beautiful, but the Italian Gothic is the nobler style” (76). 

Ruskin states a principle of economy in art: “a composition from which anything can be removed without doing mischief, is always so far forth inferior.” [Is it churlish to point out that “so far forth” could be removed from that definition, without any undue mischief?]

He provides some rules for recognizing “whether a given building be good Gothic or not, and, if not Gothic, whether its architecture is of a kind which will probably reward the pains of careful examination” (78): 

1. steep gable, high above the walls

2. windows and doors with pointed arches and gables over them.

3. presence of foliation

4. the arches in general "are carried on true shafts with bases and capitals." Exceptions noted for non-religious use.

Those identify Gothic; but is it good architecture? Some more rules of thumb:

1. “See if it looks as if it had been built by strong men,” if it has roughness, “nonchalance” mixed with gentleness, as “of men who can see past the work they are doing, and betray here and there something like disdain for it” (79). Mere precision is less likely to clearly indicate that it is of the “noblest” schools.

2. Irregularity, with “different parts fitting themselves to different purposes, no one caring what becomes of them, so that they do their work. If one part always answers accurately to another part, it is sure to be a bad building...”

3. It has “perpetually varied design” in ornamentation. (180)

4. “Read the sculpture.” The sculpture on a building should be legible from a distance. “Thenceforward the criticism of the building is to be conducted precisely on the same principles as that of a book” in terms of the knowledge and feeling communicated.

Ruskin would no doubt be depressed and disappointed upon trying to “read” the architecture of today with its almost total lack of sculpture or artisanal ornamentation whatsoever. More importantly, he would note that its ugliness, its drabness and arrogance, directly reflect the dissociation of designers from builders: the problem with modern architecture is that it reflects the hierarchical, exploitative relations through which it was built, and of the deeply unequal society which built it.