Our Architecture, Ourselves

Buildworld recently released a survey of the world’s ugliest buildings, six of which are located in the United States. Washington, D.C.’s J. Edgar Hoover Building topped the list at number two and Trump Tower in Las Vegas rounded out the tenth position. There’s no excuse for some of the crimes on this list—the Scottish Parliament Building, for example, or England’s Preston Train Station—but in some cases, ugly buildings are nothing more than the unintentional result of city managers and elected officials “wanting to try something new,” spending heaps of money on a building that didn’t quite work, then shrugging it off with “well, we bought it, now we have to live with it.”

But for a few of these—the F.B.I. Building, Trump Tower, the unsettling Ryungyong Hotel—there’s a case to be made that even as they lack the beauty, form, and grace of traditional classical, Victorian, or even Modernist architecture, they show us something about the world and ourselves.

Christianity gave the world a multitude of great gifts. One was the belief that history is linear: a progression from the moment of Creation to the world’s inevitable end. By breaking us free from the endless cycle of progress and return that characterized the ancient world’s understanding of human destiny, history’s arrow freed space for true innovation. Time and history became the expanse upon which human beings discovered themselves, their capacities, and their world. But that progress is not unlimited. Human nature and nature’s laws are static; at some point we may reach the limit of our capacities.

In many cases, we probably already have. It’s safe to say we won’t discover a better way of organizing politics, for example. Churchill famously noted that democracy was the worst form of government, except for all the others that had been tried. And all the others have been tried. Any changes we make now are just tweaks in the margins of already existing systems. Technology is truly a new frontier and the realization of some of its more fantastic hopes has the capacity to change us fundamentally. But short of science fiction, one wonders if the reason we don’t see anymore Bachs or Mozarts is because all the great music has already been written. Heidegger, who wrote in the early twentieth century, is the last of the great philosophers. If you start with the ancient Greeks and move forward, you realize he’s the last because he’s the last possible; there’s really nothing left to say.

So what happens to all of today’s prodigies? They find themselves in a world where many—if not all—of the great artistic innovators lived centuries before their birth. They stand on the shoulders of giants…and hit the ceiling, or so they think. In architecture, the program equivalent of ChatGPT can print blueprints for Classical Building A or Skyscraper B once it has dimensions and a budget. The architect who wants to create something wholly new has to go off script. No one really thinks he can top the Taj Mahal. But what if we stack a bunch of blocks on top of one another and call it Brutalism? That’s new. No one’s designed buildings like that before.

Architecture is a practical art that aims at three goals: buildings should fit their space and environment, successfully serve their intended purpose, and showcase themselves as works of art. Unlike a painting, which is beautiful regardless of setting, a successful building in one setting can be unfit in another. A cathedral’s transcendent beauty is the product of the sacrifices of generations of medieval villagers, who gave their toil and treasure to build a monument to God the completion of which they would never see. Notre Dame cathedral recreated in the middle of the Las Vegas desert would risk looking tacky and out of place—much like Las Vegas’s replica Eiffel Tower does—and might border on unsettling, because a cathedral isn’t just an architectural and engineering feat, but a reflection of a people and a world that has passed into history. That reflection can’t be uprooted and repurposed without losing its essential essence. Beautiful churches are still built, but they’re architectural variations in the style of Europe’s masterpieces rather than replicas. Their ambitions are modest.     

So in some cases and in some settings, architectural ugliness might be appropriate. The Brutalist F.B.I. Building is harsh, but it's also fitting: its harshness reminds us of the state’s power. Trump Tower is as gaudy as Las Vegas itself. The beautiful, shell-like Sydney Opera House fits on the shore of the Pacific Ocean, but duplicated in the middle of Pyongyang, it would be out of place: the empty, eerily unsettling Ryugyong Hotel fits the unsettlingly eerie cult that is North Korea. And setting aside momentarily practical limitations, there’s space in our large and diverse world for different architectural styles, some beautiful and awe-inspiring and some harsh and even ugly. Washington, D.C. would certainly be more aesthetically appealing and harmonious if all of its government buildings were in the neoclassical style, but there’s something apropos about housing the F.B.I. in a brutal box.

At its truest, architecture is a reflection of a place and a people. Humanity is sacrificing and reverent, but it is also harsh, gaudy, and cult-like. We are both ugly and beautiful. But we are also aspirational. We should view the low in light of the high, not the other way around. And if a people and a world shape architecture, cannot architecture also shape a people and a world in turn? Why not surround ourselves with what is highest in human beings rather than what is lowest? Gaudy isn’t good enough: it’s a cheap facsimile of the beautiful. Harshness is pride and decisiveness without compassion. And a cult is reverence and devotion untethered from reason. Even if the frontiers of art, architecture, and even philosophy have become comfortable, manicured parks filled with innovative little breweries, we shouldn’t revel in the cheap and the ugly just because it’s novel. Our architecture and art should be a reflection of our virtues and aspirations rather than our vices. And as for those prodigies who can’t think of anything new to do with their genius, well, fantasy novels are filled with descriptions of impossibly tall, crystalline towers; palaces that look like flowers or flowing water with floating terraced sky gardens; and self-sustaining ziggurats that can hold entire cities. Maybe there’s something new to discover out there after all.