The rise and fall and rise again of ‘architectural tradition’
For the most part, architecture — asthmatic, pudgy, aloof — has been left on the sidelines of the ‘culture wars’ - a protracted and largely digital conflict fought over the terrain of superhero films, videogames and, more recently, the wearing of masks. But, in the aftermath of the April 2019 electrical fire that gutted France’s iconic Notre Dame, a new species of ‘revivalist’ aesthetics found root in any number of subreddits, Facebook groups and Twitter posts, raising the alarm — often in starkly racist terms — that the aesthetic heritage of the ‘West’ is under threat from unverified dog-whistle conspiracies about an intentional campaign of ‘extremist’ violence. But what are this movement’s roots, where did it come from, and what does it actually want?
In some senses, the history of western Europe is a history of the pillage and burning of churches, of holy sacral spaces. Tumultuous, decade-spanning wars were carried out with the trashing of altars and the pillaging of naves. Henry VIII set fires in England’s monasteries and gutted their bodies. But for the curators of social media accounts such as ArchitecturalRevival and Traditional Western Architecture, the church — inviolate yet withered, powerful but weak — is where the idea of a collective West has lived, and where — unless “we” dig in and fight to preserve it — that same, imagined West might come to die.
‘KEEP ARCHITECTS AWAY FROM NOTRE-DAME’ blares one composite image; a crude collage featuring a confusing array of architectural extensions and interventions from the past thirty years - those including I. M. Pei’s iconic Louvre pyramid and, somewhat incongruously, Zaha Hadid’s bolt-from-the-blue terminal building, the ‘Port House’. In the aftermath of the burning of Notre Dame (long sheathed and wreathed in scaffolding and screens), the always already online Right found a fresh and still smouldering cause around which to rally and plant their flags. Over telephones and emails, wealthy donors committed millions of dollars to its reconstruction. Online, however, people made memes.
Many of these memes reflected that, with varying degrees of ironic detachment, the Catholic church is no saint - and might not be the best recipient of the world’s charitable millions. Others fantasized about the kinds of sacrilegious renovations that might be visited upon it. A McDonalds, a water park, a parking garage. Dezeen even published a clickbaity roundup of the “most outrageous” suggestions. Elsewhere, a Twitter user was widely slammed for adding VSCO filters to the fire, appealing to the inflamed “aesthetic” of the conflagration. They were not the only one. Even architects had a pop.
The Pool by Ulf Mejergren Architects
Predictably, these provocative plans were met with degrees of horror and disgust. “If the spire doesn't look exactly like it did before the fire there will be riots in the streets” commented one user. Another argued: “All these designs are horrible. This is not a multicultural center or museum. It is a Christian house of worship.” The implication that Christianity is opposite to multiculturalism (or that museums might be associated with a kind of foppish libertinism) serves itself as one small dog-whistle among many that would begin to be sounded. Clearly, the battle for the restoration of Notre Dame would be fought on culturally oppositional lines - with ‘traditionalism’ and the West the imagined target.
In architecture, the ‘paper plan’ has long been a site for radical creativity and tongue-in-cheek iconoclasm - long since the days of Archigram and the countercultural 1960s. Shorn of this context, it appeared to the uninitiated that major publishers such as Dezeen and a bevvy of slick, ironical architectural practices were really conspiring to commit sacrilege against this holy place of worship, even if we know — in very real terms — that Notre Dame will most likely be restored along traditional lines, albeit with future-proofed materials. Easily baited, the architectural joke was lost on this fretful right-wing audience.
Since Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies, the ‘culture wars’ have been identified as the oil slick through which the battle between a very online Left and Right has been waged. Alt-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos — some years before his unglossy fall from grace — made no bones about the shifting of the ground, happily parroting Andrew Breitbart’s own mantra (some would call it an oracular prediction) that “politics is downstream from culture.”
I spoke to writer and lecturer Matthew Turner about architecture’s rightward turn. “Architecture is always a way of colonising the past,” he observed, “changing that past to meet political ends,” citing Prince Charles’ Poundbury estate and the “classical proportions” of Canary Wharf. For Turner, the ‘neo-classical’ fight against ornament has historically been couched in decidedly racist terms, such as Adolf Loos’ rejection of ornamentation, “because of its association with tattooed ‘primitives’”.
But in this case, as Turner observes, this is about architecture repurposed as a meme.
Architecture, despite its transparently political agenda, has largely evaded the critiques drawn across the realms of film, television, books and games. For one, the space and audience of its consumption is fragmented from those who largely consume it. We all “use” architecture, but those who create and contest it as a site of cultural production are a much smaller clique, largely screened from the daily majority who ‘consume’ buildings. There is refraction at work - light broken through the shimmering water of a pool.
What’s more, because of architecture’s seeming ‘utilitarianism’, and the confusion of the idea that buildings are simply the reification of policy, many who might confront it are at a loss at how it might be assailed. We don’t - we believe - consume architecture as culture, and so we shift our lens to spaces with a greater and stickier mass audience appeal. It seems easier for the right to dog-pile on a game about depression or whinge and protest about a legacy film franchise choosing a female protagonist than it is to criticise the opaque and slippery references of a Deconstructivist museum extension or an irreverent new typology of housing. This is especially true when most of architecture’s major players are themselves bespectacled, white, male establishment figures. The ‘bros’ seem always already in charge. And so, while the right has been derisive of modern architecture — however broadly conceived — they have not, until recently, found a way to integrate it into the armoury of the culture wars.
This reality, of course, is far removed from the fierce political contestations of the long 20th century; where Soviet Blokovki jostled and jarred against the sleek metal-and-glass monoliths of the capitalist west. When ‘we’ sought an easy target against our slumbering enemy in the East, we could rely on the pulpy populism of Soviet housing blocks. This, we claimed, is how the other half live - and it was believed to demonstrate every reason why the West is better than ‘the rest.’
In the years after the fall of the Berlin wall and the transformation of the Eastern bloc into atomized social democracies and money-hungry dictatorships, architecture no longer functioned as the lightning rod that it once was. The blocks were a thing of the past. Newly minted autocrats made tacky appeals to the Romanov past - or else offered ultra-modernist architects like Foster and Hadid a sandbox in which to play out their most unleashed (and elsewhere rejected) designs. Architecture, it seemed, had slipped away from the moorings of everyday cultural politics.
Poundbury: the return to inanity
In more recent years, figures such as Prince Charles have pandered deliriously to the weal of traditionalism, though always within what feels like an echo chamber. Poundbury — his rose-tinted reimagining of English quietude in rural Dorset — has its handful of proponents, but remains a dull and unseemly failure which always comes across as little more than a kind of concentrated insanity, and certainly not different enough from that uniquely English sprawl of Barret boxes which litter the commuter belts and subtopias of every country across the land. We have not taken it seriously, because it is shit. I think fondly of the Reddit user who called the prince’s pet project the “McMansion of English towns.” The strongest defence came in the form of a ‘b, b, b-ut you’ve just chosen a bad photo of it!’ Not good enough. Move on. Potemkin did it better.
More recently, London’s builders have cleaved to the increasingly familiar stylings of our New London Vernacular, begging and borrowing from the plain brick facades of Georgian terraces while making unexcited gestures at the sky with buttresses that look like the skeletons of unfinished Grecian holiday homes. This, our contemporary mode, has largely happened without sustained critique, even while it blabs and grabs hungrily at the futility of a long-disappeared past. Politically, we’ve fought our battles over more immediately hostile terrain - like the murderous criminality that happened at Grenfell, or the ongoing social crisis of decanting and destruction. Robin Hood Gardens fell. And then others fell.
We did not have time for beauty. But the Right had time. And that is exactly how they got their hold on the discourse.
“Beauty and tradition matter”
Appeals to ‘beauty’ have always been stupid. On June 28th of this year, a Twitter account called ‘Western Traditionalist’ shared an image of some Soviet-style housing alongside the (solemnly leading) question: “is there anything more depressing than left-wing architecture?” It’s a strange kind of stupidity, this challenge voiced at nobody in particular. Easily dismissed (the Soviet Union’s post-war prefab flex was an instinct of command economics meets necessity), it nonetheless highlighted just how the culture war over architectural aesthetics is going to be framed.
That which is routine, regular, ‘mass’ and populist — the very vapour trail of modernism — is to be dismissed. The actually complex history of radical left-wing architecture (Karl Harx Hof, Moscow Constructivism) must be jettisoned in favour of the bogeyman of panelaki and prefabs.
Or as ‘commie hilfiger’ quote-tweeted in reply: “homelessness”. Homelessness is more depressing than “left-wing architecture”. Luckily, 460,000 people agreed.
As I scrolled and loitered through these accounts and pages, the pulse of older, more reliable oppositions made itself felt - the idea that the Soviet bloc was still an oppositional force, still the shadowy enemy at the gates. In reality, the forces of authority that gave rise to the glorified architecture of tradition — an architecture like Notre Dame — are the very same forces which shape the modern city of this day. The line between that beautiful building on the Ile de la Cite and I. M. Pei’s pyramid is an obvious one, where both architectures — in their markedly different guises — embody the wielding of great wealth and insurmountable power. What was once the preserve of Kings and the Catholic church today comes about by the dictate of finance, and the oblique cartography of late capitalism. Daniel Libeskind’s once trendy Deconstructivism shares the same air as the frenetic Rococo of Giovani Crosato
This, then, is an impossible past. Nothing but a cloying pastiche will ever again be built on the pattern of Notre Dame. It’s why such buildings find facsimiles of themselves in Chinese theme parks and Nevada’s casinos. As Frederick Jameson once remarked, “It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place.” When wealth and power sought solace in the signifiers of ages past, it did so in cheery colours, plastic cladding and ventriloquised traditionalism. When the sacristy is reimagined as a Midwestern mall, the bridge between past and future is burned to its foundations (or so the story goes). Nothing new, nothing explicitly Modern, can be beautiful.
So what, then, is the programme of these appeals to a once sacred and irretrievable past? Like all nostalgia, it operates through ellipsis and historical inaccuracy. But it must also make do with appeals to ‘common sense’ and ‘beauty’. Knowing that our offices and banks and halls of residence and apartments will not come to reflect the grandeur of Notre Dame, what do the proponents of ‘tradition’ actually want. What do they want our supermarkets to look like?
At the start of this article, I alluded — pretty directly — to the idea that this isn’t really about architecture. Rather, architecture has been picked up and integrated into the armoury of the online right - a new battleground in a war that has ripped through the hamlets and settlements and fields of film, TV, music and literature. And the answers are there, written on the wall. In one post, glorifying the (trashily grandiose) Château de Chambord, the replies descend comfortably into the territory of racial slurs and reedy peans to white suprematism. This is how appeals to ‘traditional architecture’ become a lightning rod, a dog whistle, for an online cadre of the already radicalised and racist right. Clicking on one profile confirms the hunch: “Make America White Again.”
ArchitecturalRevival, one of the more popular such accounts on Twitter, has a parallel account on Facebook. Here there is a more palpable sense that we are picking through the ruins of a battleground after the armies have moved on. “I read old books because I would rather learn from those who built civilization than from those who tore it down.” In this view, destruction is not about to happen; it has already happened or is continuing to happen right before our eyes. The bomb crater shifts, the moment of obliteration unclear. “Southerners built a civilization”, responds one poster, “and it is the left that seeks to destroy it.” Speaking of the old and new Edmonton Public Library (neither is particularly good, as far as buildings go), the terms are cast in stark and binary opposites: “Beauty vs ugliness, Natural vs synthetic, Rooted vs alien, Robust vs fragile, Loved vs loathed”. It doesn’t take much reading between the lines to discern the ‘real’ meaning of “rooted vs alien,” nor the hackneyed contrasts between that which is believed to be pure and that which is ‘degenerate.’
Gawking at ‘degenerate art’, 1937
Indeed, the most notorious 20th century example of this belief dates to the Nazi’s own war against “degenerate” art. Modernism, expressionism, the Avant-Garde. Before banning, burning and repressing the artists and the work, there was, in 1937, Die Ausstellung ‘Entartete Kunst’, or the Degenerate Art Exhibition. Here, the Nazis presented some 650 works of art that had been seized and displayed in tandem with an announcement of a “merciless war” against those who would threaten or ‘confuse’ things such as “natural form”.
In opposing ‘tradition’ against ‘modernism’, that which is ‘degenerate’ against that which is ‘natural’, the furious minds and busy fingers behind these right-ward leaning curatorial projects must know that they share some common ground with this unguent historical undercurrent. Indeed, I enjoy the beauty of Notre Dame, and I hate the crass, cramped, looming tin sheds of much ‘modern’ building and development (the objective badness of Ibis hotels, container cities, sprawling St George estates and post-1980s shopping malls), but their argument is not really about creating an architecturally beautiful world, is it? No, it’s about leveraging the idea of a false aesthetic opposition between Old and New to fan the flames of a perceived and often clandestine war against the ‘West’ - and against those things which the ‘West’ (that is, the progressive West) is so often aligned with (like, uh, the left-wing, basically). In decrying modernism, it arrogantly ignores the factor of the necessity of things like pattern-built housing (like making sure people do not go homeless) and the ideological coherence of modernism’s formal language; a language which, in Owen Hatherley’s words, “embraces and intensifie[s] the experience of modernity.” Integration rather than ignorance. Duh.
Architecture is being used, and it is the baggy, loose and shaggy idea of a libertine and ‘degenerate’ modernism which becomes the mark for the ‘revivalist’s’ ugly antimony, their genuine target; the supposedly unknowable ‘other’ of Muslims, immigrants, non-Christians, non-whites. An ‘other’ that is shaped, in Edward Said’s terms, “with various silence and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated.” And this is the ‘other’ that has very, very often been the real victim of modernity. So, this really isn’t about architecture at all. No. But then again, it kind of might be.
“A lot of churches have been going up in flames”
Across the charred and chaotic landscapes of ‘revivalist’ Twitter, Facebook and Reddit, certain countries appear with predictable regularity. France, Austria, Germany. Sometimes Italy, in its Florentine north. Stout Bavarian castles, tumbling chateaux, cobblestoned courtyards and Mittel European fantasias. And amongst it all are churches. Hundreds of them.
And sometimes — very, very rarely — these churches burn down.
On April 19 2019, the world watched while the twelfth-century Notre Dame was swallowed by flame. Great, choking massifs of billowing grey and cloudy orange soared and eddied from its seemingly tiny and fragile frame. I have seen it once, half-drunk, in the Parisian darkness. A looming thing, sort of hard to encompass with your entire eyeball. As I said above, this firey accident struck a nerve, creating a void into which the right plunged its flags and its swords.
Up in flames in Ain
More recently, just over a year since, another elderly and half-neglected church suffered a similar (but less disastrous) thing. This time in Ain, a department in eastern France. And like the events of a year before, the finger-pointing started up. As did the dog-whistles.
“It’s arson. That’s why it’s happening” claimed one poster who, when pressed for sources, shared an easily discredited and unverified blog from May 2019. The post in question, “Extremists: France’s many burning churches,” shares unverified rumours across its three short paragraphs, and a low-resolution, icon-laden map whose points of interest (vandolised churches?) is not interactive, despite having the appearance of originating from Google Maps. Research by Dan Evon of Snopes tracks the source of this map, which had appeared in the aftermath of the Notre Dame fire in 2019. His findings are as follows:
This map comes from the christianophobie.fr, a website dedicated to tracking acts of “Christianophobia” in France and the rest of the world. While this image is often shared as if it shows all of the churches that were “destroyed” in France, this map actually documents a wide range of nefarious activity, such as vandalism, theft, and arson, that occurred at both churches and cemeteries over an apparent span of two years (not four), covering 2017 and 2018.
In other words, the map claims to evidence acts of deliberate “extremist” destruction, whereas in reality it only points toward a range of criminal activity with multiple, unconfirmed perpetrators, with no evidence of any strategic plot. It includes graffiti, littering and petty vandalism, and absolutely does not evidence a national campaign of coordinated arson.
And yet, the argument put forward by the original blog concludes in deceptively suggestive terms:
“Who’s behind this trend? “A variety of extremists enraged by the identities and teachings that the churches symbolize — Christianity, French nationalism and Western civilization at large.”
Indeed, the sole article it cites, in turn, claims only that the state should “identify” the perpetrators behind specific, more localised acts of vandalism on church property, though it too alludes to a larger conspiracy of intentioned attacks. But as the article itself concludes, “no graffiti or claim of responsibility has surfaced to suggest that the Notre Dame fire was anything but an accident.” At no point is there evidence, claim or commentary on a network of “extremists” behind these incidents. Yet the suggestion remains.
On Twitter, the same map makes another appearance in response to the church arson conspiracy theory, turning it into a kind of odious watermark for a variety of claims whose opaque, nodding wink always skirts at the idea of a targeted plot against French churches, without a shred of substantiation. There’s just the map and the map alone. This time, the original post claims that Saint Trivier de Courtes - that church in Ain - “[has] burned down”, continuing: “recently a lot of churches have been going up in flames. I wonder what has changed in France [sic]”. The poster’s bio — as ever — confirms the hunch; “Every white country is now occupied & under siege”. The map, posted underneath, is liked, retweeted, but left without comment.
Of course, when we look more closely at the fate of Saint Trivier, we learn that the fire — in the belfry — was not only brought under control but, according to local news, attributed easily to its age and “an afternoon thunderstorm.” A firefighter on the scene lay early blame on lightning that had struck the tower, smouldering slowly before bursting into open flame. It goes without saying, again, that old, vulnerable buildings with large amounts of dry historic wood are easy targets for all kinds of accidents and unfortunate coincidences. In part, local churches and diocese are unable to conduct the kinds of lavish reconstructions that for even Notre Dame, the country’s most iconic place of worship, was not ultimately enough to save it from fire. Rushing to blame, both directly and indirectly, ‘non-white’ agitators, these accounts willfully miss the more prosaic root. In some cases, this is down to simple neglect - or slowness to proof these buildings against the future.
Online, of course, the waters are shifting - sometimes shallow, often deep. Sometimes, the internal confusion of this lopsided revivalism are starkly revealed. On Reddit, I watch a user post a derisive photograph of Corbusier’s church at Ronchamp — a smouldering Neolithic adze angled and charging from the rolling soil. It receives short and exacting shrift (the word ‘vandal’ is thrown in, though it is unclear what has been vandalized exactly. The earth itself?). But other commentators — even self-described ‘revivalists’ — come to its salvation, surge forth to defend it as one of the ‘good’ modernisms.
Within the weft and warp of this heterogeneous digital community, it remains unclear where “good taste” really begins, and what past they are actually trying to revive. It is perhaps a little fitting that structures such as Hungary’s parliament and the Palace of Westminster are “idolised” by the community for their appeal to tradition, when both were late buildings themselves mimicking an already defunct style. It is the act of revival — rather than its aesthetic content — that shouts the loudest.
Western revivalism and trickle-up traditionalism
The fire that tore through Notre Dame marked a brand new chapter in the online culture wars, where architectural aesthetics became the newest toy in an already bristling arsenal. Immediately, figures across the alt-right, Catholic right and ‘traditional’ far-right saw the accidental burning of this church as a lightning rod around which to rally their mawkish and offensive campaign. Finally, there was a way to drag architecture into the furious, ahistorical and racist soup of digital white supremacy.
While claims that the fate of Notre Dame was part of a wider anti-Catholic, anti-Western conspiracy abounded, these did not easily ‘trickle up’ into the global architectural conversation. But the appeal to revivalism did find an audience. In February of this year, members of the National Civic Art Society penned a draft executive order informally called “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again”, advocating for architects to adopt a classical style when designing federal courthouses and buildings in the nation’s capital of Washington D.C. Reporting in the Architectural Record confirmed that the draft had fallen on supportive ears at the White House, claiming that the “Trump administration is considering [the executive order] that will direct that U.S. government buildings with budgets greater than $50 million will be designed in classical and other traditional styles.”
Revivalism — in other words — has found its foothold. And while the executive order offends mainly on the grounds of taste and function, we should be rightly concerned about the active flows between online revivalism — and its links to the racist far-right — and national planning and policy decisions made in the upper echelons of government. Backwards-looking and blind to the needs of modern cities, settlements and populations, these flows might obliterate the reasons why we don’t build need to build Notre Dames anymore.
Ultimately, any open channel between actual architecture and online spaces which explicitly advocate for white supremacy should have us alarmed. After all, if these new-old classical buildings are to be built, then it signals a tacit nod and a wink from government’s lofty heights to the squirming, dangerous underbelly which sprawls beneath it. The fire at Notre Dame is not yet out.