Nikos Salingaros: Architecture as a Cult
"2. Defining a cult.
A system may be identified as a dangerous cult if it has the following characteristics, combining aims with techniques:
1. It aims to destroy
2. It isolates its members from the world
3. It claims special knowledge and morality
4. It demands strict obedience
5. It applies brainwashing
6. It replaces one's world view
7. It has an auto-referential philosophy
8. It creates its own language, incomprehensible to outsiders
I will show here that contemporary architecture satisfies these criteria.
3. Architecture and cults.
Few people today connect architecture with religion. And yet, up until about the last two centuries, architecture could not be distinguished from religion. Today, architecture has broken away from religion in forming its own cult. Architecture competes with religion because it promises transcendent pursuits to its practitioners. It offers mystical enchantment, with insights left to be discovered purely by the power of creativity, and thus an opportunity for any initiate. The architect sees a chance for transcendental expression beyond the utilitarian uses of a building.
From this, it is not surprising that architecture misused the workings of religion to further itself.
The Bauhaus and Taliesin -- two "compounds" upon which contemporary architectural education is based -- followed a cult structure.
It is irrelevant whether the spiritual groups mentioned above represented beneficial, benign, or harmful cults. Cult methods were applied to make architecture into a new cult, and an extremely dangerous one because of its virulence and destructive aims. A key aspect of modernism was an absolute belief in the necessity of eliminating all pre-modernist architecture.
The point where architecture turned into a cult can be identified with the abandonment of traditional building culture. Like science, architecture has a vast store of practical knowledge and technical skills that one needs to master before making original contributions. By throwing all of that away, the modernists could offer instant gratification to those who joined the cult. They attracted followers using the myth of the creative genius. Instead of learning and absorbing a core body of knowledge, they trained for allegiance to the architectural cult.
4. Brainwashing.
Cult indoctrination begins by tearing down a person's confidence and self-esteem; i.e., one's emotional equilibrium as established via the childhood development of one's intuition and senses. Tactics for achieving this include mental and physical humiliation to discredit what are already automatic and natural responses. After one's major point of internal stability and referential attachment to a world view is effaced, that candidate is open to any kind of indoctrination.
For several decades, architectural novices have been conditioned by the message that sensual gratification from ornament and architectural forms, surfaces, and colors is a criminal act. It is asserted that such sources of pleasure are fit only for primitive peoples and social degenerates. Indeed, a cultivated non-response to sensually emotive architectural elements is supposed to characterize the intellectually advanced individual. As a psychological and physiological reaction to those forbidden elements is normal, however, this message induces feelings of guilt and worthlessness, as required to break down a student's spirit. Self-esteem is then rebuilt using the modernist repertoire of alien, hostile forms and surfaces -- and, from then on, only the cult's reality is considered valid.
One of the slogans of the Bauhaus was "starting from zero". Its aim was a radical restructuring of human consciousness. Every incoming student was subjected to intense psychological conditioning designed to cleanse every preconception regarding architecture, so as to re-wire the student's neuronal circuits.
The studio method of architectural training lends itself perfectly as a technique for cult indoctrination. A student's project is judged -- without having a basis of proven logical criteria -- as to how far it resembles currently fashionable buildings. The student's grade is entirely up to the whim of the teacher. It is no wonder then that, despite the widely-pronounced aims of limitless creativity, all students' projects tend to look the same and to conform to stylistic dogma. Students who don't adopt the cult's beliefs are eliminated before they can get their degrees, so they never join the architectural profession.
5. The cult of Deconstructivism.
In a devastating hoax, the two physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont have exposed some of the most prominent French deconstructivist philosophers as charlatans.
Charlatans are not protected in the scientific world. The society of their peers would expel them from positions where they could continue to do harm. Science needs to protect its foundation more than its individual members, something that will not occur in a power-driven discipline that lacks a scientific basis. In the architectural arena, deconstructivists are unassailable because the discipline is based largely on cult beliefs. Those who use deconstructivist philosophy to justify their bizarre constructions are now at the top of their profession.
There is something dangerously wrong with a society that ignores the exposure of intellectual impostors. If part of a system is pathological, this puts the entire system at risk. Systemic connections will eventually infect the rest of the system (in this case, society as a whole), and thus destroy it. Our civilization appears to be so complacent with its recent technological progress that it does not recognize threats to its very existence. We are distracted by technological toys and are not applying our scientific knowledge to keep our society in healthy working order. More traditional cultures are aware that something is dreadfully wrong, but they don't know how to react in a constructive manner.
Architecture schools are training graduates who are indoctrinated into deconstructivist philosophy, yet are unable to design a simple building fit for human sensibilities. Deconstructivist buildings, moreover, have been shown to remove life from the environment. Life here is defined in mathematical terms as a measurable degree of organized complexity that is characteristic of biological forms. None of this is even remotely perceived by either practicing architects, or students who would become architects, because the discipline has become entirely self-referential. There is no contact with outside reality, which is arrogantly stated to be the deconstructivist's principal aim.
The deconstructivist agenda is to destroy the logical foundations of knowledge and reasoning, in a way that would make it impossible to reconstruct it afterwards. For deconstructivist architects, there is no more utopia, only nihilism.
6. Architectural cult symbols.
As psychological conditioning is used to reformat the minds of architecture students with an "approved" set of images, this indoctrination develops negative associations for "disapproved" images of traditional buildings. A remarkably effective propaganda campaign has successfully linked traditional architecture with all the ills of history. To many, a Classical building now stands for something evil, and a building in local vernacular style as a serious impediment to progress. Just as experimental animals and human prisoners-of-war are conditioned to react automatically to a particular stimulus, architects have been conditioned to feel a physical revulsion for new buildings in traditional styles. They have been brainwashed by the cult to identify the cult's "enemy" without reflection.
Modernism's cult symbol is an empty rectangle, with the concept of emptiness expressed by its interior being just as important as the sharp rectangular edges. Since modernist dogma strictly forbids ornament on the human range of scales 1cm - 2m, there exist no true modernist symbols on those scales to which human beings can connect. The imposition of modernism's alien aesthetic is achieved by creating a void. Its symbol is precisely the absence of symbols. The mental image of "pure" form erases living structure from our world.
Theo van Doesburg (of De Stijl and the Bauhaus) is credited with saying that: "The square is to us as the cross was to the early Christians". Here we encounter a philosophical shift of levels, from visual symbols to an abstract ideal. The modernists worshipped the unattainable abstraction of geometrical purity, and this displaced all visual and architectural symbols of the past. This indicates the transference of values from traditional symbols and rules (which could express religion) to an abstract ideal (which therefore competes with religion).
Deconstructivism is an offspring of modernism that retained many of its parent's cult symbols; for example their sharp edges and high-tech surfaces. Seeking novelty from within a severely limiting style, deconstructivist architects abandoned early modernism's horizontally-aligned rectangular geometry to create broken straight lines, diagonals, and curves. Modernism's ideological aim of eliminating the copying of historical forms and symbols was achieved via severe geometrical abstraction. The only possible direction to move from empty abstraction -- without returning to the ordered complexity of traditional architecture -- is to destroy forms altogether. Because modernism as a thought system denies organized complexity, it could only evolve into disorganized complexity.
Architectural cult symbols act like viruses to infect the built environment. They have even parasitized established religions, with the consequence that postwar religious buildings are spreading the cult's ideology rather than their clients' spiritual values."
http://www.intbau.org/archive/essay3.htm
