There's a thoughtful article in The American Enterprise about avant-garde architecture. The writer's criticisms of "challenging" buildings go far beyond "they're ugly" — he also claims that people don't take very good care of structures they perceive as hostile:

Paul Rudolph's Art and Architecture Building at Yale, constructed of hammered concrete in the early '60s, when avant-garde architects were experimenting in a style called "brutalism," is absolutely dismal in parts of its interior. The stairwells feel like a movie set for Escape from New York. Utility conduits snake crudely over surfaces. The most basic function of a building—keeping foul weather out—is only half-performed. I've visited the building often since 1982, and for as long as I can remember cold air has rushed in every winter through a two-inch gap beneath one of the stairwell doors. Millions of BTUs have been wasted. Rudolph's is a truly anti-social building, and its users simply will not be bothered to maintain it. The problem isn't money, it is the building's arrogance, which registers in people's psyches and weakens their commitment to keeping the structure in good order.

The article quotes MIT professor Bill Hubbard, who thinks architecture should be more like the law, "upholding forms that have gained acceptance over time, and expanding or diverging from those forms cautiously as new conditions warrant.... Such guidelines do not rule out innovation. They only require that the innovation have sufficient justification—that it not be a whim."



There's a sidebar on the same page about "Modern Architecture's Nasty Authoritarianism." It explains how post-war urban planners caught the attention of "enlightened technocratic politicians" who had two things private developers lacked: eminent domain power and access to Other People's Money.

We all know what happened next. The planners took neighborhoods that worked, called them slums, and had them torn down to replace them with projects that quickly became violent, drug-infested hellholes.

New Haven built some of those high-rise public housing projects, and they proved just as disastrous as the ones in other cities. A "progressive" acquaintance of mine once tried to justify New Haven's miserable experience by explaining that 60s-era planners mistakenly thought that New Haven was going to become a huge city. So they weren't just meddling utopians — they were incompetent meddling utopians!

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