CHAPTER 1
M odernism “An evil fate wills it,” Leibniz lamented once, “that men from time to time revert to darkness out of boredom with light.”4 Unlike earthquakes or epidemics, such events result from human will and actions. Individuals who foresee them may even try to prevent the disaster by arguing against the misconceptions that are about to cause it. Their reasoning may be solid, but as it is directed against the desires and fancies of the popular opinion, it necessarily fails to achieve its purpose. Arguably, this is what happened with Geoffrey Scott’s book The Architecture of Humanism, at least in the eyes of those who regard the rise of modernist architecture as a major calamity of the modern era.5 Written in the second decade of the twentieth century, Scott’s book targeted a series of views about architecture (“fallacies” as he called them) that were increasingly becoming influential in his time. As it turned out, these same “fallacies” came to constitute the fundamental tenets of the modernist movement in the years after the first world war. Scott was, one could say, an antimodernist before there was Modernism at all. At the same time, he was decidedly modern in the sense of the full endorsement of the modern scientific, materialist, worldview. Even from the perspective of our present-day physicalism—the view that everything is physical, that mental phenomena are ultimately reducible to neurobiology, biology to chemistry and chemistry to physics—Scott’s perspectives on architectural theory can be seen as uncontroversial. The most significant of the “fallacies” that Scott targeted is the attitude that he called “romantic”: the view that evaluates all architectural works on the basis of the ideas associated with them. This is an approach that dismisses as insignificant the aesthetic qualities that arise purely from visual and formal elements (such as shapes or colors) or their combinations.6 Instead, the “romantic fallacy” assumes that what matters in the works of art and architecture always depends on the meanings, ideas and concepts associated with these works. In opposition to the “romantic fallacy,” Scott insisted that forms “impose
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