Making Dystopia

Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism by James Stevens Curl, 388 pages

In Making Dystopia, James Curl attempts to debunk the myth that Modernist architecture evolved organically in continuity with earlier styles and therefore represents the only acceptable style for the present era.  Curl provides a detailed explanation in words and (more importantly) pictures of how Modernism represented a revolutionary rupture with the moralistic, traditionalist, humanistic architectural philosophies of Pugin, Ruskin, and Morris, and the establishment of a new aesthetic ideology that is Puritanical, anti-tradition, anti-history, anti-culture, and therefore ultimately totalitarian and thoroughly anti-human.

The pictures are vitally important because it is not enough for Curl that the reader should concede that he is right, he wants us to see why he is correct.  More than either an argument in architectural theory or a history of modern architecture, the book is an education in how to understand architecture.  Yet Curl does not neglect the social, political, or commercial factors that contributed to the triumph of Modernism despite its unpopularity, either.  In his account of the process by which theoretical abstraction gave momentum to the development of artistic abstraction, there are many similarities to Wolfe's The Painted Word, but despite this (and the overt allusions to Pugin's Contrasts) the book it most resembles may be The Stones of Venice.  This comparison may displease the author, but it is devoutly hoped that his book has the kind of impact in our time as Ruskin's had in his.