Saturday, April 26, 2014

Plenticidal Modernity's pruning hook unleashed against Victorian architecture

Well before the Jewish Holocaust, Plenticidal Modernity was at work busy eliminating all the "useless mouths" of exuberant Victorian architecture : the end result being the bare grey concrete monstrosities of  The International Style , that Auschwitz of Architecture.

The Victorian Era was also the era of the Evangelical Majority and it is very tempting to see the Evangelical belief in the worth of all the varieties of humankind echoed in their highly eclectic building style.

We know how the 20th century's biggest killers felt about architecture because , when not busy killing millions, they were spending millions creating architectural plans for Nazi , Fascist and Soviet style buildings : massive , stark , grey slabs.

I happen to love Streamlined Moderne buildings (the central art direction motif for ITV's Poirot TV series) but I also know they were a plenticidal waystation on the rail line to architectural and actual Auschwitz.

The 1930s's mania for streamlining anything and everything living and non living was plenticidal eugenics in concrete, wood, steel and glass ---- as Christina Cogdell makes clear in Eugenic Design .

By 1942 , Jews , Slavs and Romas had become the non-essential trim being scrubbed off the exterior of the human building...

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