The Deepening Woes

 
Most reactions that I receive to my habitual disdain of all things modern are predictably condescending, even from people who generally agree that old fashioned buildings look better. Is it that strange that I do not like refrigerators?

Modernity is about buying what we desire. Modernity is about plastic surgery. Modernity is about movies and fast cars. Modernity is about psycho analysis. Modernity is about both free love and paid love. Both involve intrigue. Modernity is about packaging and aggressive marketing, for the fear of going broke on a dream. Modernity is about the blurring of boundaries and yet the buildings are as sharp as a samurai sword, well some are, most are about as attractive as box knives. Modernity is about abundance, except there is a blurred line with excess. Modernity is about posturing, staking a claim to one's own deserved halcyon days. Modernity is about waste.

It is important to remember that the principal aim of the early modernists was social advancement not mass consumption, unity of purpose not cultural disintegration but they failed to set it up.

Recently in Foligno, there opened a new church designed by Massimiliano Fuksas. It provokes many points of contention.

I. Beauty and Style

It feels stupid to see the disdain in its intrusion into a flat non-hierarchical space within the confines of an anonymous two storey suburb. A dumb sloping forecourt leads to a dumb wall trimmed by a low set continuous strip of glass, somewhere in the middle of which, there is a frameless glass double door. There is a neat juxtaposition of a floating cube inside the external cubical box. The cubic volume above is ample but the hovering effect is unnerving. It could be read as a suggestion of transcendence but in practice it has the (possibly intended) opposite effect. Since Fuksas is an atheist, it could be argued that he does not understand the idea of worship. The side chapels are cold hearted cubicles where one could choke on the banality. This contrast between marvel and disgust could well be intended as a stylistic joke but this is where the strangeness of the modernist game becomes rather macabre.

In this space the message will not expand out to the walls but contract into the repeated actions which by themselves without the reach are rather meaningless. In this way style overwhelms the dramatics of liturgy. It fails therefore at a fundamental level of functionality.

II. Beauty and Substance

The human material in architecture, its raison d'etre, is what? Modernity claims function, then destroys it. It evolves into hard-core stylism. Frank Gehry pretends that his mission is to distort this stylism but he too is on the unholy trail to find the ultimate artifice. Surely, beauty is not for the intellect. It is substantive. It is identity. It is the very substance of character. Its power to please is not a mystery. Its evidence in nature, we call harmony. So while it may be present in geometry, it is perforce absent in inert, irrational or amorphous forms.

Will the woes deepen? What is living well? Questions that do not have singular answers are probably not worth asking.