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LC was - somewhat credibly - accused of fascist sympathies. https://brill.com/view/journals/fasc/6/2/article-p196_196.xml?language=en https://brill.com/view/jo

LC was - somewhat credibly - accused of fascist sympathies. https://brill.com/view/journals/fasc/6/2/article-p196_196.xml?language=en https://brill.com/view/journals/fasc/6/2/article-p196_196.xm... Urban renewal wasn't necessarily the wrong solution in itself. The 18th and 19th centuries weren't necessarily any better at humane building. In the UK postwar worker housing stock was terrible - outside toilets, little or no insulation, no central heating, and often poorly built. So blocks were a solution of sorts. But they usually were poorly built and unimaginatively designed, optimised for low cost, but with no practical understanding of community or community spaces. A typical UK block has some decorative grass around it, but that's it. There's no common space, no common facilities, and no colour or texture. Later renovations which add at least some of the above are more popular and have fewer social problems.

trgn 5y ago
Thanks for that link. I don't know about his personal thoughts, but just judging from his work, LC's architecture certainly had a fascist tinge, in the sense that through that kind of architecture man submits to authority. A-tower-in-the-park is a very authoritarian top-down way to house people. There was also his exaltation of destruction, to create a clean slate from which a new architectural order can arise, and fascists certainly appreciate violence as a force of change. Just do deviate a little from LC in particular. But both communism and fascism are the political realizations of modernism, in that they only can function through the mediation of high technology. In communism, equity is achieved through perfect bureaucracy; the system of production and wealth reallocation being a well-oiled machine, perfectly transparent and predictably manipulated. It is in communism, that humans completely submit to the machine the most. In fascism, dominion is achieved through incessant violent action. Technology is the necessary lever to maintain dominance over the enemy. It is in fascism that humans submit to their leader, exhilarated by their shared power through technology (Tanks! Bombs! Nuclear Reactors!) Since no technology is perfectly reliable, or technological dominion is never guaranteed, both are doomed to fail.
- syntheweave 5y ago
  There's a commonality between modernism and the realization of an the industrial mass consumer society in the 20th century that transcends the ideological divides of the time. Factories, warehouses, office buildings, tower blocks, shopping malls, highways and suburbs all have the same rationales of mass production economics beating at their heart. A skyscraper is simply a "people warehouse". In this respect the gradually growing criticisms of modernism and the fraying of the postwar political order go hand-in-hand. A criticism of a one-size-fits-all lifestyle equally applies across the fascist/communist spectrum, and the "Californian ideology" that SV represented drove a stake into it by standing up for the individual, albeit in an amoral, Randian sense: cool toys for those who could afford them, digital sharecropping for the rest. The highly provisioned, toy-like offices of Google etc follow from that premise.
  - trgn 5y ago
    +100 > the gradually growing criticisms of modernism and the fraying of the postwar political order go hand-in-hand fwiw - I think the growing criticism of modernism are a good thing. The alternative, a more humanistic attitude to life and liberty (corny I know), and a more organic model of political organization seem preferable. I also agree that the amoral SV-ethos was wrong, because of the elitism you point out.
    - agumonkey 5y ago
      I think that modernism was a natural fad which has run its course and people realize that we overshot and forgot counter intuitive details that aren't addressed by comfort or "progress".

trgn 5y ago

Thanks for that link. I don't know about his personal thoughts, but just judging from his work, LC's architecture certainly had a fascist tinge, in the sense that through that kind of architecture man submits to authority. A-tower-in-the-park is a very authoritarian top-down way to house people. There was also his exaltation of destruction, to create a clean slate from which a new architectural order can arise, and fascists certainly appreciate violence as a force of change. Just do deviate a little from LC in particular. But both communism and fascism are the political realizations of modernism, in that they only can function through the mediation of high technology. In communism, equity is achieved through perfect bureaucracy; the system of production and wealth reallocation being a well-oiled machine, perfectly transparent and predictably manipulated. It is in communism, that humans completely submit to the machine the most. In fascism, dominion is achieved through incessant violent action. Technology is the necessary lever to maintain dominance over the enemy. It is in fascism that humans submit to their leader, exhilarated by their shared power through technology (Tanks! Bombs! Nuclear Reactors!) Since no technology is perfectly reliable, or technological dominion is never guaranteed, both are doomed to fail.

syntheweave 5y ago
There's a commonality between modernism and the realization of an the industrial mass consumer society in the 20th century that transcends the ideological divides of the time. Factories, warehouses, office buildings, tower blocks, shopping malls, highways and suburbs all have the same rationales of mass production economics beating at their heart. A skyscraper is simply a "people warehouse". In this respect the gradually growing criticisms of modernism and the fraying of the postwar political order go hand-in-hand. A criticism of a one-size-fits-all lifestyle equally applies across the fascist/communist spectrum, and the "Californian ideology" that SV represented drove a stake into it by standing up for the individual, albeit in an amoral, Randian sense: cool toys for those who could afford them, digital sharecropping for the rest. The highly provisioned, toy-like offices of Google etc follow from that premise.
- trgn 5y ago
  +100 > the gradually growing criticisms of modernism and the fraying of the postwar political order go hand-in-hand fwiw - I think the growing criticism of modernism are a good thing. The alternative, a more humanistic attitude to life and liberty (corny I know), and a more organic model of political organization seem preferable. I also agree that the amoral SV-ethos was wrong, because of the elitism you point out.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    I think that modernism was a natural fad which has run its course and people realize that we overshot and forgot counter intuitive details that aren't addressed by comfort or "progress".