CRIMES IN CONCRETE: Theodore Dalrymple reviews James Stevens Curl’s Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism. Like Curl, it’s safe to say that the good Dr. Dalrymple is not a fan of modernist architecture:

The ideas of the modernists were generally expressed in the imperative mood and were frequently of a pseudo-mystical nature. Professor Curl’s description of some of the practices prevalent in the early Bauhaus make for hilarity; cranks are always a source of fun. In the early days, the modernists of the Bauhaus tended to a form of health mysticism involving vegetarianism, garlic paste, and regular enemas.Far more important, however, was their early and inherent attraction to totalitarianism. As the author points out, Gropius and Miës van der Rohe had no objection to Nazism other than that the ­Nazis failed to commission work from them. Gropius was an opportunistic anti-Semitic snob who espoused communism until it was no longer convenient for his career. Miës sucked up to the Nazis as much as he was able. The fact that both of them emigrated from Germany has done much to obscure their accommodation with the Nazis and even allowed the modernists to pose as anti-Nazi—though the most important proponent of modernism in America, Philip Johnson, had for some years been a rank Nazi in more than merely nominal terms. Moreover, as Professor Curl points out, the Nazi aesthetic, like the communist, had much in common with modernism.

The most startling instance of the modernists’ elective affinity with totalitarianism is of course Le ­Corbusier. To call him a fascist is not to hurl all-purpose abuse at him, but to state a literal truth. But, as Curl wryly remarks, you won’t hear any of this in a British architectural school—let alone a French one, despite the fact that in 1941, only a year after the Exode (the flight of eight million Frenchmen before the advancing Germans), Le Corbusier wrote a booklet, Destin de Paris, proposing to deport a large proportion of the population of Paris to the countryside, since in his elevated opinion they had no business living there in the first place.

It is possible however, to picture the twilight of those whom Tom Wolfe dubbed “the White Gods” in From Bauhaus to Our House, his classic 1981 demolition of modern architecture. Mies and Gropius died in 1969, just as the modern-day radical environmentalist movement was birthing itself. Last month, Green New Deal and SUV enthusiast Bill de Blasio uttered, “We are going to ban the classic glass and steel skyscrapers which are incredibly inefficient.” Yesterday, the Atlantic ran a column attacking another central tenet of modernism, the open plan, under the headline, “Open concept homes are for peasants.” Add to that books such as historian Jonathan Petropoulos’ Artists Under Hitler and French journalist Xavier de Jarcy’s Le Corbusier, un fascisme francais, both published in 2015, and the White Gods are looking increasingly tainted by the Maoist left that’s been awfully busy lately memory holing some of the 20th century’s most powerful cultural figures. Socialists devour their own, eventually.