Bomber Command Memorial, in London. (Sky News)

Leon Krier argues that people should be permitted to prefer architecture they like, and dismisses modernists who browbeat the public for the alleged ignorance it expresses in disliking their work. His latest piece in BD, Britain’s building design journal, is “People have to be brainwashed to appreciate the Soutbank or Robin Hood Gardens.”

How true! Most architects, designers, artists, and critics in those fields, and their assorted camp followers, have had their appreciation of beauty purged by their educations or their careerism. Most people not involved in such fields, who allow their opinions of buildings to be influenced mostly by how they feel those buildings look, actually have a sounder basis for clear and penetrating judgment of architecture.  Krier writes:

Historical places and traditional aesthetics are endearing to people generally, not because of “history” – “culture” ­– “memory” – “power” but simply for their self-evident superior quality and the enduring values they embody. Human intelligence and sensibility is spontaneously seduced and convinced by objects that are meaningful and beautiful, without explanation or justification and independent of time, location and ideology.

To that I would only add that scientific research has found much evidence that traditional taste is reinforced by the deepest human biological  and neurological traits. It turns out that nature does have an opinion. I like Nikos Salingaros’s suggestion that in furiously resisting such evidence, let alone the public’s preference, modern architecture behaves like a cult.

It was difficult to choose which of his article’s nine paragraphs to quote. Beware, however, of the introductory line (not the headline), probably written by the BD editor. It says that “modernists have no right to judge” people’s taste. That is not so. Modernists have a right to oppose and even to ridicule people’s taste, but no right to prevent people from expressing their taste – which they attempt to do all the time.

Hats off to John Massengale for sending Krier’s brief essay from BD to the TradArch list.