- Paperback: 169 pages
- Publisher: Little, Brown & Company (15 Feb 1983)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0316099392
- ISBN-13: 978-0316099394
- Product Dimensions: 27.4 x 21.3 x 1.3 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,915,062 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Synopsis
Offers a thorough indictment of modern architecture and calls for less urban planning and demolition, more reconversion, and an end to city zoning.
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1 review
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
The Modernist Failure
19 Dec 2010
Format:Paperback
Here's an oft forgotten book, that shouldn't be. At a time when the large majority of people still resist modernist architecture...as opposed to new architecture...this book explicates the reasons why. The majority will say that modern architecture is hard, cold, expensive, and unsuitable for comfortable living. Blake posits the facts: That the earliest modernists were abstract theorists, and as such their greatest failure was...and continues in modernism's latest iterations...in not designing for how people actually live.
Blake notes that such work is designed out of the abstract industrial aesthetic. An aesthetic, fitted into the deductive planning mentality, affecting the public from the top-down, instead of vica-versa. The author underlines as well, that beauty, harmony, order , and the recognition of urban context have not been the virtues of modernist 20th century work.
This book still has validity, for in architecture today, our traditional architectural heritage is being rediscovered...not in the sense of work to be copied...but work to be stimulative, and to be learned from. The modernist cry against traditionalism has always been; "Pastiche!". But the truth is that modernists themselves...still widely populating architecture schools...are guilty of their own emulations of the modern "masters". This could be laudable if the work, as Blake amply illustrates, has not been so horribly bad.
Blake demonstrates, and my taste informs me, how so much of work today has become "look at me" design, by enfant-terrible starchitects....building often wildly abstract, impractical designs for human use...buildings that in fact, leak. Blake points out that Modernism has left us a legacy of unlovable architecture...often quite actively ugly. This remains as true today as it was in 1977, when he wrote this forthright mea culpa.
As an architect himself, and former editor of "Architectural Forum" magazine, he was well positioned to make his warnings. Is is a misfortune for us all, they were not heeded....though modernism continues to be suspect by the public. Today Blake's views retain their freshness and contemporary connection. He deserves to be rediscovered by the profession itself.
Blake notes that such work is designed out of the abstract industrial aesthetic. An aesthetic, fitted into the deductive planning mentality, affecting the public from the top-down, instead of vica-versa. The author underlines as well, that beauty, harmony, order , and the recognition of urban context have not been the virtues of modernist 20th century work.
This book still has validity, for in architecture today, our traditional architectural heritage is being rediscovered...not in the sense of work to be copied...but work to be stimulative, and to be learned from. The modernist cry against traditionalism has always been; "Pastiche!". But the truth is that modernists themselves...still widely populating architecture schools...are guilty of their own emulations of the modern "masters". This could be laudable if the work, as Blake amply illustrates, has not been so horribly bad.
Blake demonstrates, and my taste informs me, how so much of work today has become "look at me" design, by enfant-terrible starchitects....building often wildly abstract, impractical designs for human use...buildings that in fact, leak. Blake points out that Modernism has left us a legacy of unlovable architecture...often quite actively ugly. This remains as true today as it was in 1977, when he wrote this forthright mea culpa.
As an architect himself, and former editor of "Architectural Forum" magazine, he was well positioned to make his warnings. Is is a misfortune for us all, they were not heeded....though modernism continues to be suspect by the public. Today Blake's views retain their freshness and contemporary connection. He deserves to be rediscovered by the profession itself.
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