Charles Durning Carroll

The time has come to kill architectural modernism. While the ideas that underlay the movement produced some fine buildings (though admittedly none that come to mind) the dictum of Adolf Loos in his essay “Ornament and Crime” that avoidance of ornament was “a sign of spiritual strength” could not be more wrong.

Loos likely was responding in part to religion and a world of religious edifices that had always been decorated. In the early years of the 20th century, when a new spirit of rational inquiry evolved in Europe and when ideas of social equality were coming to the fore, the rejection of religious architecture may have made some sense. But a century has passed, and though religion still retains an iron grip on too many human lives, the architectural ideas of the great cathedral builders, even if they were once passé, are now as fresh as spring flowers.

Le Corbusier, perhaps the most famous of the triumvirate of Modernism composed of himself, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe took the well-meaning ideas of rationalism and extended them too far. Le Corbusier’s love of the car–his separation of cities into various functions–transportation, living, shopping, etc. was totally contrary to ideas about living, vital, glorious cities.