Architecture Is Always Political
7th December 2024
Why is it that, after politicians, bankers and lawyers, architects have such a bad reputation among the general public?
From the Left, architects are held in suspicion or outright hostility as the tools of global finance, willing collaborators with corrupt municipal authorities, apologists for the predations of capital. From the Right, if anything, the contempt is even greater, with architects denounced as the avant-garde of a brutalist, hubristic modernism that has stripped our cities and towns of the layers of history and the particularity of place, both of which they have replaced with a homogeneous landscape of concrete, steel and glass.
And why, perhaps just as importantly, do the vast majority of architects appear to be resigned to this animosity, content to bury their heads in the latest gadgets for digital modelling and 3D-printing while the Tower of Babel they have built is everywhere crumbling into dust?