I’ve often walked down the street and wondered: why aren’t new buildings a bit nicer? To my personal taste at least, modern architecture feels rather drab.
Earlier this year, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter read my mind. I had a virtually blank, follow-free account on X for the purposes of following the UK election, and the algorithm wasn’t happy. What was I interested in? It tried references to TV shows I’d never watched, influencers that I’d never heard of, funny cat videos, even supposedly British humour, none of which secured my engagement. Eventually the algorithm hit on a series of accounts featuring laments on the architecture of days gone by, threads about great works of art, discussions about history and culture, and photos of buildings with structurally unnecessary but visually appealing flourishes.
Most of these accounts followed each other. It felt, briefly, like I’d discovered an active community of enthusiasts for aesthetically appealing architecture. Maybe there was something lovely on X after all. Then I noticed that many (though certainly not all) of these accounts featured varying degrees of enthusiasm for a lost time of imagined glory, traditional Catholicism, pseudoscience, right-wing politics, and Mel Gibson’s worst films…
One account that posts frequently about subjects likely to make a Skeptic reader wince is Culture Critic (1.5m followers). In amongst explorations of ancient Greek and medieval architecture and art by Bosch and Boticelli, one can find an essentially uncritical thread on the St Michael’s ley line – “The line reflects the epic final stroke of St. Michael’s sword that sent Satan to Hell” – and repeats of architectural myths about the golden ratio as it relates to the Parthenon and beyond.
Culture Critic doesn’t hide its enthusiasm for religion, so there is also understandable discussion of religious relics, including the ever-controversial Turin shroud, which in fairness has had two major studies this year reported in the news, one saying it could actually be 2,000 years old, the other that it definitely wasn’t created by imprints from a human body. Given the popular sympathetic coverage in mainstream media of the Turin shroud, I can’t really argue with this coverage.
However, even in this area of interest, the account introduces errors that are sympathetic to the church. For example, the account has a long thread about the construction of cathedrals, which paints a picture of religiously inspired communities pulling together to achieve something extraordinary. One post says that “Most of the labor [to construct a cathedral] was ordinary townsfolk or local craftsmen, carving it all lovingly by hand.” This is not correct; the stonecutters who carried out some of the more advanced work were typically itinerant and went wherever there was paid work.
Culture Critic talks about community-wide enthusiasm for the creation of these multi-generational edifices, but we know that many local folk contributed unskilled or semi-skilled labour on the promise of forgiveness of sins – aka indulgences – and paid for the construction through enforced tithes. Church taxes, spiritual blackmail and workers going wherever the work was isn’t really “the general will of the people” as the account claims.
World Scholar (40k followers) also mixes curious historical errors with genuine archaeological wonders. One thread on ancient wonders suggests the Tower of Babel actually existed, and features a picture of the Colossus of Rhodes that is, perhaps, an order of magnitude too large compared to the actual statue.
Yet another account with curious historical errors is Thinking West (130k followers), which has threads that glory in Roman roads, Gothic architecture, and… feudalism! The account says that criticism of feudalism for limiting social mobility has “some merit, but is often overblown”, citing the following example:
William Marshall became the most prominent knight in England despite being born into a relatively obscure family. His martial feats made him a legend, and he went on to knight two kings and take custody over Henry III before the young king came of age.
The word relatively is doing some heavy lifting here. William Marshall’s father John was an Anglo-Norman nobleman who was Marshall of England under Henry I. John held lands in Somerset and Berkshire, property in Winchester, and two castles in Wiltshire, before William was even born. The average Hollywood nepo baby would be green with envy for such a warm connection. Thinking West goes on:
Serfs had it tougher, but by the late middle ages were granted increasing liberties, and a gradual shift from serfs to landowning peasants occurred. In England, a middle class emerged called “yeoman,” who were often minor landowners, guards, or subordinate officials.
This at least acknowledges that serfdom was bad, although “had it tougher” understates it. Serfs could not permanently leave their village, marry, or change their job without permission, and were often treated harshly without any avenue of redress. And pointing out that serfdom declined over time is not a defence or mitigation of feudalism. The end of serfdom was an important step towards the end of the feudal system more generally. The suggestion that feudalism’s negatives weren’t so bad because eventually one of the key negative aspects of feudalism declined isn’t a great defence of the feudal system.
While there’s an obvious danger in all this – users engaging with the delightful pictures and the interesting slices of history, and then being misinformed or drawn into certain ideologies along the way – there’s also an interesting overlap in the opposite direction.
For example, Culture Explorer (77k followers) mixes odes to Braveheart as the “most quintessentially masculine movie” and enthusiasm for the children to be educated towards the Classic Learning Test (whose exams “draw heavily from the Catholic intellectual tradition”) with stunning pictures of palaces, cathedrals and modern-classical sculpture. But the account also features a passionate thread about the most bike-friendly cities in Europe, to generally positive engagement from its followers.
And, to be absolutely clear, many of the accounts within this community are uninterested in politics, religion or pseudoscience. Mediterranean Aesthetics (278k followers) features very little other than lovely pictures of the Mediterranean. Cultural Tutor (1.7m followers) is as enthusiastic about classical music, art and history as some of the aforementioned accounts, but with the added bonus of sticking to the facts and evidence. I’m not an enthusiastic user of social media – obviously, otherwise I’d have active accounts! – but it seems to me there’s still value for Skeptics in engaging with X, for those who can face it.
As to my original question – why modern architecture seems to be dull and missing stylistic flourishes – there are lots of opinions available, from staying bland in order to satisfy the largest number of people and incidentally saving a few quid for the property developers, to a sense of powerlessness causing apathy on the part of the general public. Perhaps, in 2024, we get the architecture we deserve.
