Branford Courtyard, Yale University

THIS ESSAY was written by an anonymous correspondent:

I took the train up to New Haven yesterday to admire Yale’s architecture, which I haven’t done in nearly ten years. It was a lovely day and everything looked perfect.

I was lying on the grass in the main court of Branford College just as the late-afternoon sun was pinking the towers, wondering how anyone could fail to be inspired by such beauty to defend the culture that had created it. Then the answer came to me: modernism, whose true significance is that it destroyed people’s emotional, aesthetic attachment to existing society.

It was also crystal clear to me, wandering about Yale (and I walked all the way from the train station to the Divinity School), that this is the architecture of a specific race and culture. Modernism, of course, which used to be called quite frankly the International Style, is the opposite. Yale’s architecture is far more specific in this regard than the Italian Renaissance campus of Columbia University, which alludes strongly but vaguely to the general Western humanist tradition. Yale is unmistakably Anglo-Saxon and Christian, and frankly, certain human types just look ridiculous wandering its campus, as if you had planted a palm tree in front of Stirling Library. Such aesthetic harmonies should be part of our instinctive emotional equipment, and I suspect they once were.

And of course it follows that if you carelessly give up on the aesthetics, then sooner or later the rest goes too. It is becoming increasingly clear to me that artistic freedom is an utter mistake, and that artists must exist under strict regulation, or a rigid tradition. The simple justification of this for architecture, even in a liberal society, is that it is one art form that people have no choice about experiencing. One more reason why the cult of artist as superman must be destroyed.

Getting back to aesthetic harmonies, it seems to me that the deliberate universalism of modern architecture can only produce alienation in the people condemned to live in it for the simple reason that it never looks like home, since “home” is always someplace specific with a cultural identity and a history. And this is of course not confined to office towers in New York: the soullessness of modern suburbia is a preeminent example. And this is why I would never live in Denver, which has NO indigenous style of its own whatsoever.

People forget that to maintain traditions is not just a political value, it is essential to maintain people’s basic emotional comfort and familiarity with their surroundings. People need and love things to look “the same as it did when I was a child.” But of course this “wallowing” comfort, deeply connected to instinctive self-confidence, was an explicit target of modernist aesthetics in all its forms. They deeply believed, for example, that if people were just “looking at pretty pictures,” then they weren’t really appreciating art. This is why they deliberately tried to make art ugly — they weren’t incompetent and they really did think they had a good reason for it. This may be the master key we have been searching for in terms of why the old elite never defended the the ancien regime in America. They had been destroyed by psychological warfare.

If the traditions of practical aesthetics, which includes social mores and the racial balance of a population, are not  upheld, then whole sections of the population gradually move into internal exile. The eventual outcome of this is that people either collapse, they capitulate, or the smarter ones evolve the most sophisticated surrender of all: post-modernism, which as you can clearly see in its breezily neo-traditionalist pastiches in architecture is always ready to revive our traditions just as soon as they have become mere decoration.

That is to say, just as soon as they have become meaningless.

— Comments —

L. P. writes:

I would add:

Then the answer came to me: modernism, whose true significance is that it destroyed people’s emotional, aesthetic attachment to existing society. (And nature itself.)

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