A fundamental notion I hold regarding Symbolic Urbanism is that the places we build reflect the values we hold. In this, the difficulty most of us have with contemporary architecture (and urbanism) is not simply that it is ugly aesthetically. For many architects, that is a feature, not a bug. Rather, this ugliness reveals a deeper cultural problem facing not just art and architecture but all aspects of current western civilization; the loss of any cosmological meaning and direction. The values and shared vision of what constitute “reality” that have held us together for almost 2,000 years have collapsed. The story we have told ourselves, sourced in Christian symbolism and Greek philosophy and mythology, about who and what we are, no longer hold any meaning for us. There is no story to be told any longer. The western world believes it has liberated itself from false religion with its more rational scientific vision; but without a universal set of beliefs held together by shared mythology, telling us who we are and how to conduct ourselves, a society will collapse. This has been understood for thousands of years; it is a story repeated in the Old Testament, ancient Mesopotamian mythology, and on up to the writings of Nietzsche and Jung. The ugliness of modernist architecture is a mere symptom of this larger crisis. What we are facing is not merely a loss of beauty but of its underlying meaning and purpose.
A good starting point for a discussion such as this is the accompanying article, Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture (and if you don’t, why you should). Published in Current Affairs magazine in October 2017, it outlines the cultural and aesthetic wound that modern architecture reveals. The article ends with a call for us to learn to speak again. But speaking is of no value, unless there is a story worth telling, one with the power to change lives. THAT is what we must recover. Read the full article here: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contemporary-architecture?fbclid=IwAR23cfZUDZUoEF_F7kldYqJV4M532gDjY6pghn6MINmpfFF_gT66xjVFL5g_aem_Afxi08vn-gMzTNmBN4oIykkuxqgXJTSu9P7Lf9NG86q2FJR_IO00ZI4KOoRSqgXrPmU
TheUrbanEvolutionary 