On Roger Scruton: Beautiful Buildings, Style Wars, and Architectural Diversity

This is not a eulogy

Most have probably heard by now of the passing of British philosopher and intellectual Roger Scruton, who died the week before last at the age of 75 after being diagnosed with lung cancer six months prior. While his politics and conservative stance on issues like marriage, sexuality, and identity were at times controversial and inflammatory, Scruton’s contributions to the fields of aesthetics and architecture seem worthy of a post here.

Tributes to Scruton’s life have been written by his peers and others more intimate with the man and his work than I. So instead of giving another eulogy of Scruton and his commitment to philosophical rigor, I want to do something of a different take here. As such, I’ll be taking a look at Scruton’s often unpopular views on architecture and his appreciation for traditional building forms, both in his own words and through the voice of some opposing commentators.

For those of you who are, like me, fairly uninitiated, your familiarity with Scruton likely starts and ends with his 2009 BBC documentary Why Beauty Matters. And/or perhaps, less favorably, with his recent forays in the press due to some unfortunate and misconstrued statements he made on China and George Soros’ “empire of Jews” that were widely regarded as racist and anti-Semitic. That not withstanding, in the popular Why Beauty Matters, Scruton makes the claim that beauty, like art, has no utility. It has no function, serves no purpose, and is thus created and consumed for its own sake. This, Scruton argues, is what gives it value – “Nothing is more useful than the useless.”

Useless beauty

Scruton carries this belief over to his ideas on architecture. In his eyes, it is the ornamental and decorative elements – not the functional or useful – that make a building beautiful to behold. Take his treatment of a seemingly minor and oft-overlooked architectural detail:

“Without mouldings, no space is articulate. Edges become blades; buildings lose their crowns; and walls their direction… Windows and doors cease to be aedicules and become mere holes in the wall. Nothing ‘fits’, no part is framed, marked off, emphasised or softened. Everything is sheer, stark, uncompromising, cold. In a nutshell, mouldings are the sine qua non of decency, and the source of our mastery over light and shade.”

– The Classical Vernacular: Architectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism

In this reading, mouldings are not only crucial to creating lovely and visually interesting buildings, but also good and decent ones. Scruton decries the “abolition” of mouldings – as in the skyscrapers of a modern American city – as a “visual calamity.” This view is of course not one held, or held quite so adamantly, by many architects practicing today. As a staunch defender of traditional or vernacular architecture and, more narrowly, classic architecture – that is, derived from the principles of the Greek and Roman architectural Orders – Scruton’s appreciation for the decorative has long put him at odds with much of the architecture community, the “modernist architecture establishment”, as it were.

Allusions to this rivalry can be found in the recent accounts of Scruton, with many obits including quotes from his left-leaning peers, architects like Hugh Pearman and Sean Griffiths. Take Pearman’s oft-published tweet: “Obviously we were not on the same page when it came to architecture or much else but in debate he was courteous and stimulating, and I’ll miss the presence of his intellect.” Such commentary is apparently included to demonstrate that in the face of death, even the staunchest of Scruton’s intellectual enemies are able to summon neutral, if not adulatory words to mark his passing.

Style wars

Curious to understand more about Modernists like Pearman and Griffiths and their own views on what makes good or beautiful architecture (not to mention why Scruton’s love of traditional buildings is so offensive to such tastes) I set out to explore the aesthetic sensibilities and philosophical underpinnings of both camps. In doing so, I discovered that this rivalry goes back to a period in Britain in the 1980s termed the “style wars”, at which time an aesthetic and intellectual debate divided the architecture community between Modernists (“Mods”) and Traditionalists (“Trads”).

Stranger still, this war was allegedly ignited by remarks made by Prince Charles regarding a proposed National Gallery extension during a speech he delivered to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects. For the record, his comparison of the would-be addition to “a monstrous carbuncle” – a severe abscess or cluster of boils – seems no more inflammatory to me than the chosen metaphor. But architects are known to be a sensitive lot. And my knowledge of the inner-workings of the British psyche when it comes to sensitive matters of the Crown is, admittedly, rather poor.

Nonetheless, that culture war raged on and has apparently been so influential that it is referenced even now by architects and the wider press. Recently, the UK government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, of which Scruton was appointed chair in 2018, was accused of reigniting this tired debate, with architect Charles Holland describing the commission as “a tedious hangover from the 1980s, a pantomime Prince Charles speech reverberating forever.” In the time since, the so-called Trad aesthetic has not gained much popularity among architects, as Pearman allows:

“The British Trads don’t get much of a press from the modernist-dominated architectural establishment, something their more vocal members have been banging on about for years. Doomed to be forever unfashionable, and in these days of gender politics unfashionably male, theirs is not a kind of architecture that finds much favour with the architecture schools or awards panels. Though some of them engage with the profession at large, most don’t. They sit in their urban or rural studios and design away, untroubled by the opinions of their peers… With the kind of loyal, well-heeled client base they can command, there’s not much need to go after the approval of fellow architects, who may be a bit hazy about the Orders, and a bit iffy about ornament generally.

Partly this reticence is because of the 1980s style wars led by Prince Charles… Partly it’s to do with the associated fact that supporters of the Trads tend to be on the political right – the likes of militant Tory philosopher-aesthete Roger Scruton or the architectural historian David Watkin. And then there’s the unavoidable fact that in the 20th century, the classical style was the tyrant’s style of choice, and so became closely associated with totalitarianism.”

Trad-gic comedy

That an entire decade of bitter in-fighting between two opposing architecture camps was and still is mainstream news – that I had never heard of – struck me as amusingly absurd. Eager to understand this professional rivalry, my search for Scruton’s works on aesthetics and architecture evolved to a wider foray into the writings of his detractors and, by extension, critiques of traditional architecture. For transparency’s sake, I should confess that, while I by all means do not harbor a full stop contempt for modern architecture and at times even appreciate it (in fact, I often rather like Brutalism), my preference is undoubtedly for the Tudor, the Victorian, the Craftsman. And this taste lands me undeniably in the unfashionably old-fashioned Scruton camp. With this admission in the open, you can understand my confusion as to why anyone might declare “war” on traditional architecture, as well as my horror as to what could possibly make Griffiths so vitriolic over London’s stately row houses as to gripe:

“God forbid that we suggest Georgian houses, with their dubious provenance and leaky, jerry-built envelopes, be extended upwards to accommodate expanding populations or radically retrofitted to meets today’s meteorological needs. And as for knocking a few of them down to make way for the new, such is our pathetic obsession with nostalgic and biased visions of our collective history, the mere suggestion of such is likely to have one transported to an island colony for the criminally insane.”

Griffiths continues in this vein to argue for the preservation of a recent modernist structure, Amin Taha’s limestone 15 Clerkenwell Close in central London. He suggests that rather than demolishing the unpopular building, we might “knock down some old stuff instead,” starting first perhaps with “some of the elegant Georgian terraces of London’s Bloomsbury” and adding that “there is, after all, rather a lot of them.” My initial reaction to this suggestion is naturally one of shock and dismay. But in an attempt to counteract my bias, I will allow that yes, there is an abundance of old brick and stone terraced houses throughout parts of London. Does that make them any less necessary or lovely? I would think not, and I know that for myself and for many residents and visitors alike, their weathered charm is part of the city’s allure. Now before anyone goes rolling their eyes at an appeal to quaint nostalgia, consider the argument that Scruton makes for conservation – that people are drawn to preserve traditional buildings because they imbue a sense of place and attachment:

“Streets built in the traditional way are loved and cared for: people campaign to preserve them, and experience sentiments of ownership towards them, of a kind that they rarely feel towards the downtown areas of a modern megalopolis. And there is a deep reason for this, which is that these vernacular building styles are rooted in the aesthetic sense –they grow from the natural application of aesthetic values in our everyday reasoning, and from the place of architecture in civic life.”

Build architecture, not art

Traditional design methods are able to embed these everyday “aesthetic values” by building on a human scale and configuring spaces that enable and support daily activities around living, working, and gathering. Scruton insists that there is a humility to this type of building that is a necessary component of place-making. Such architecture is not concerned with novelty or exceptionalism for its own sake but with belonging – belonging in the sense of materially and stylistically integrating into a specific place as well as in furnishing a space in which people can comfortably come together. It is this sense of belonging and bringing together that apparently instills in people that duty and pride of preservation. In this way, architecture – in both its creative process and in the beauty it produces – is different from art. It is for this reason Scruton warns that a building should not aspire to genius in the same way that a work of art does:

“Ordinary architecture, however adventurous in its use of materials, forms and details, cannot rely on the excuse of artistic licence in order to creep through the planning process. In art we attempt to give the most exalted expression to life and its meaning. In everyday arrangements we simply try to do what looks right. Both cases involve the pursuit of beauty. But the two kinds of beauty touch different areas of the psyche. To create art you need imagination and talent — what the Romantics called ‘genius’; to create everyday beauty you need only humility and respect. In art, we are free to explore life in all its varieties, to enter imagined realms, and to open ourselves to our highest aspirations. Artistic beauty lies at the apex of our endeavours, and to fall short is to fall flat.”

He goes on to expound the differences between art and architecture and makes the case for prioritizing conformity and “manners” over risk and style in the latter:

“In everyday life, by contrast, beauty is a matter of adjusting our arrangements so as to fit to the contours of ordinary needs and interests, as when we lay a table, plant vegetables in rows or arrange the pictures on a wall. Everyday beauty lies within reach of us all, while artistic beauty is the occupation of the few. Much architecture lies somewhere between the two, being to a great extent a matter of fitting in and doing the job, but also overcoming aesthetic problems that require imagination and even inspiration for their solution. For ordinary people, however, it is the everyday fitting in that counts, and this is manifested in all the criticisms that we hear of recent developments. In everyday building it is as risky to stand out, to dominate, to be boastful and ‘iconic’ as it is in social gatherings. Everyday beauty is a matter of manners, not style.”

I’m sure that some reading this will find Scruton’s interpretation of the function and purpose of art and architecture to be narrow and stale. And for those who make it their life’s work to pursue greatness and take risks in architecture or whatever endeavor, this admonishment to settle for something less than genius, to be polite and to not make waves or to offend, might even seem defeatist or regressive. Whatever your take, Scruton’s writings on the intent of architecture, its limitations, and how its form should fulfill its humble purpose, are crucial to understanding his philosophy on building and beauty.

The rise of modernism

Where traditional architecture accomplishes this bringing together of place and people, for Scruton, most modern architecture fails miserably. He argues in “The Architecture of Social Isolation” that ugly and impersonal environments — that is, of the kind he associates with the Modernist school — lead to depression and anxiety. In its rejection of the familiar townscape, local materials, and traditional styles, this architecture, rather than creating a sense of place and belonging, generates sterile “no-places” of isolation. He traces the advent of this to the post-war years and simultaneous rise of the International Style in the early twentieth century:

“The international style had entered the world with the fanfares demanded by a new and liberating aesthetic. By the time it was the day-to-day idiom of commercial architects, it was not an aesthetic at all but a way of abandoning all aesthetic values in favor of a routine functionality whose only effect was to make places into no-places, streets into tower blocks, settled communities into crowded heaps of lonely individuals.”

Function became prized above all else, and there was no longer room for anything deemed to be useless or merely decorative. And in a way, perhaps, this rejection of the Orders and proportion and harmony was liberating for architects practicing in a new age of economic and technological possibilities. It would seem that many found it so, for in the decades that followed, Scruton suggests that Modernists were able to win the “battle of ideas” and effectively take over architecture schools:

“The vandalization of the curriculum was successful: European architecture schools no longer taught students the grammar of the classical Orders; they no longer taught how to understand moldings, or how to draw existing monuments, urban streets, the human figure, or such vital aesthetic phenomena as the fall of light on a Corinthian capital or the shadow of a campanile on a sloping roof; they no longer taught appreciation for facades, cornices, doorways, or anything else that one could glean from a study of Serlio or Palladio.”

I haven’t the slightest idea what a campanile on a sloping roof is or how light might fall on a Corinthian versus a Doric capital, but both images sound lovely, and it makes me sad to think that they might be lost. Nor, as someone who has never laid eyes on an Arch 101 required reading list, can I presume to know whether or how true it is that the Orders have all but disappeared from schools. I have only my observations of the built environment to go by. And those observations are predominantly of glass and steel office towers and boxy mid-rise apartment buildings that dominate the landscape of new construction in any given American city. If there are currently buildings going up that make use of local materials and vernacular styles, they must be hidden behind all that metal and concrete.

Kitchen gadget skyline

While it is clear that Scruton laments the rise and domination of modernist architecture, what faults specifically does he find with the contemporary skyscrapers and apartments of our downtowns? What, in his eyes, makes the modern city so unattractive, so ugly? First and foremost, it would seem this has to do with the inability or refusal of modernist building to maintain a sense of coherence with the existing streetscape and surrounding built environment. Indeed, Scruton states that modernism’s primary failure,

“lies not in the fact that it has produced no great or beautiful buildings – think of Le Corbusier’s Chapel at Ronchamp, or the houses of Frank Lloyd Wright. It lies in the absence of any reliable patterns or types, which can be used by ordinary builders so as to harmonize with the existing urban décor, while respecting the street and the façade as the defining contours of a shared space. The degradation of our cities is the result of a modernist vernacular, whose principal device is the stack of horizontal layers, with jutting and obtrusive corners, built without consideration for the street, without a coherent façade, and without intelligible relation to its neighbours. Such buildings, generated from ground plans, cannot be stitched into the urban fabric, but form blank and detached surfaces, bounded by edges, with no welcoming apertures to mark the boundary between inside and outside, and no decorative stitching to bind them to the neighbours, to the skyline or to the street.”

It is this absence of place and disregard for contextual harmony that Scruton sees as modernism’s worst sins. There is of course too its rejection of the decorative, its horror of ornamentation. As for the mouldings that Scruton holds so dear…

“The curtain wall jettisons all that. It is manifestly poured out, or made from poured components, which are not composed since they merely repeat each other as panels do. Not surprisingly, therefore, the introduction of the curtain-wall vernacular has led to a new experience of the street, which is no longer a set of facades and entrances, shaped by the human hand and alive with moulded details. It is simply a screen, a barrier, which repels the passing glance, and displays the people within as aliens, bottled in a world of their own.”

Modernism has thus removed the human and the home from the city and replaced it with the alien and the impersonal. Indeed, there is something inherently less inviting to the manufactured sleekness of a glass tower than to the humble composition of a brick facade. These are, of course, different animals, and both may have the capacity to be of aesthetic interest and value. Yet there is a loss of visual harmony and sense of place when a building is designed with the primary concern to stand out from and over its neighbors. Scruton describes this phenomenon as “kitchen gadget” building. These structures, which often actually resemble a giant kitchen or household gadget, are sleek and self-contained and, as the analogy implies, are designed to exist apart and independent from one another and the wider environment. Scruton argues that in this way their form is actually established against their surroundings and to the detriment of the city:

“As our cities become littered with junk of this kind their streets will gradually fall apart, or become mere thoroughfares, with no civic meaning, since civic meaning comes from composition, which is the way in which buildings align themselves in mutual relation. But perhaps the real defect in this fluid architecture lies precisely in the originality that it advertises. Each gadget is entirely new, an expression of its own self-contained aesthetic, which is an aesthetic that no other building can share, unless it is simply a repeat performance. Each gadget is the complete formula for its own style, and the architect who wishes to put something next to it… is forced to produce another self-contained gadget and another aesthetic that is unique to the building in question. Once the architect turns his back on the art of composition, the very possibility of a civic architecture is in doubt. Streets, squares, public spaces and boundaries are all thrown into disarray. The gadgets are attention-grabbing in an adverse way, and their lack of compositional grammar forbids us from relating them to anything around them. Their message is that they do not belong. And in their presence nor do we.”

A building that is designed to be a spectacle, to stand out and apart, is not one that is imbued with the respect and humility that Scruton believes is required of beautiful building. If there is a thought as to how it might compliment or relate to the surrounding built environment, it is in terms of how it can diverge from, upgrade, or overshadow the rest. Of course, these “kitchen gadget” buildings represent the worst offenders on the large and varied spectrum of modernist architecture. There are a great many modernist buildings that, to varying degrees, do seek ways to be informed by and to compliment the fabric of the neighborhood in which they stand.

Designing for the future

Thus, while recognizing the aesthetic, cultural, and historical merit that traditional architecture brings, we should not lose sight of how new materials and ways of building might also generate value, particularly in terms of sustainability and affordability. At the same time, we can consider the ways in which traditional building materials and techniques might at times be a hindrance to progress on these fronts, as Griffiths rather caustically reminds us that historic preservation,

“increasingly means having to negotiate, not so much history’s mystical palimpsests, but an onerous legislative patchwork of conservations areas. The latter protect buildings of often-dubious merit on the false premise that they “tell our story” and for reasons that often have more to do with the maintenance of property values than the protection of buildings of architectural worth. They do so at the cost of new and urgent architectural ideas.

Readers will not need reminding that we are experiencing immense technological and social change. Our emergencies include climate change and a housing shortage – problems that call for imaginative thinking about our building stock… So afraid of the future are we, that we cannot imagine allowing behind the polite facades of established streets, the creation of a veritable zoo of architectural experiments reflecting new forms of habitation, made from unfamiliar renewables and rendered in as yet unimagined aesthetics.”

There are undoubtedly architects working today to utilize innovative designs and materials in an effort to combat these massive social and environmental challenges. Conversely, it may often make better economical and ecological sense to retrofit and upgrade existing buildings than to demolish existing ones or to break new ground. The point here is that the way forward is not to dispense outright with the traditional building of the past, nor is it to let our scramble to save the future be at the expense of the aesthetic. Rather, we might accommodate for both, either coexisting separately or integrated together, with the latter taking the best elements of both to create spaces that are beautiful, integrative, and have a strong sense of place, while addressing our modern needs for affordable and environmentally sound housing and public spaces.

Architectural diversity

When designed in a way that respects the vernacular of the cityscape, it is possible for traditional and modernist styles to coexist side-by-side in more or less harmony. Perhaps this is where I would diverge from Scruton, but in my eyes, an architectural landscape that invites a bit of diversity and novelty is more visually stimulating and aesthetically appealing than one that simply repeats monotonous forms, be those traditional or modern. Pearman advocates for this pluralism of architecture and gives space for the inclusion of traditional architecture within the modernist-dominated establishment, admitting that he’s,

“always been fascinated by the Trads: the differences between them; the craft skills their buildings encourage; the emergence of a younger generation in recent years; the fact that you can see their architecture evolving. Trad architecture now, for instance, isn’t much like Trad architecture of the 1950s. It may draw on Ancient Greece and Rome for its inspiration but it inhabits the same world of building regulations and new technology as every other approach – with added drawing beauty. It helps architectural biodiversity.”

While traditional architecture allows the past to inform it, it by no means has to be static. It too can adapt and evolve while maintaining the principles of proportion, ornamentation, and congruity that anchors it to a place and its people. Allowing for this, Pearman again calls for the inclusion of the Trads and, more broadly, for diverse and inclusive design:

“Architecture is now at the most pluralistic point I have ever known it. A huge variety of styles and approaches is available. But formulaic designs continue to be trotted out, as far too many of the new urban rash of apartment blocks and towers in our cities bear witness. Monocultures are never good. A healthy dash of new traditionalism for the many, not the few? It’s all about architectural biodiversity. Let’s be seeing it.”

As with ecological and social systems, it would seem that diversity is key to our systems of building and living. While I’m sure that Scruton would agree that an injection of “new traditionalism” is the antidote to the “urban rash” of bland apartment blocks and nondescript office towers, I am less confident where he would fall on the prospect of advancing architectural diversity. After all, his Ruskinian devotion to architectural ornament is well-established. But as for me (and perhaps most people not still mad about the style wars), I would certainly cheer the resurgence of traditional architecture while welcoming the growth of a Modernism that tends to a more humble and congruent style of building that puts people, place, and yes, beauty too, at the center.