In present day society, architecture is the poor relation of the arts. People are accustomed to living in ugly surroundings, in bad housing, in congested cities, surrounded by noise and pollution. At weekends, some of them go to art galleries, where, for a few hours, they can gaze upon paintings hanging on walls – islands of beauty in a sea of monotonous ugliness. Thus beauty is boxed off from life, an unattainable dream, a fiction, as remote from reality as the furthest galaxy from the earth. So remote has art become from life that many people regard it as a useless irrelevance. Hostility towards art, which is seen as the privileged preserve of the middle class, is a further consequence of the extreme division between mental and manual labour. Barbaric conditions breed barbaric attitudes.

It was not always so. In earlier human societies, music, epic poetry and fine speaking were the common property of all men and women. The monopoly of culture by a small minority is the product of class society, which deprives the great majority, not only of property, but of the right to a free development of their minds and personalities. Yet, if we delve a little beneath the surface, we find a great desire to learn, to experience new ideas, to seek broader horizons. The thirst of the masses for culture, deeply repressed under “normal” conditions, comes to the surface in any revolution.

The Russian Revolution of 1917, that allegedly barbarous act, was in fact the starting-point for a great upsurge in culture, poetry, art and music. This cannot be expunged because the blossom was later crushed under the jackboot of Stalinist reaction. In the Spanish revolution of 1931-37, there was a similar artistic renaissance – the poetry of Lorca, Machado, Alberti, and above all, Miguel Hernandez was inspired by the struggle, and in turn was listened to with rapt attention by audiences of millions who had never before had access to the marvellous world of art and culture.

In a revolution, ordinary men and women begin to see themselves as human beings, capable of controlling their own destinies, not mere “tools with voices”. With true humanity comes dignity, a sense of self-respect and its necessary companion, respect for others. The waiters put up notices in the restaurants of Barcelona in 1936 saying: “Just because a man has to work here, it does not mean you have to insult him by offering a tip.” This is the birth of culture – real human culture, which is part of life itself. The same phenomenon, in embryo, can be seen in every strike, where men and women reveal qualities they never dreamed they possessed. Of course, if the movement does not lead to a complete transformation of society, the dead weight of habit and routine once more predominates. Material conditions determine consciousness. But a socialist society based on a high level of technology and culture would completely transform the outlook of people.

It is often alleged by logicians and mathematicians that the kind of perfect symmetries that they admire possess an intrinsic aesthetic value. Some even go so far as to claim that the most important thing about equations is not whether they tell us anything about reality, but whether they are aesthetically pleasing. Whereas no-one will deny that symmetry can be beautiful, there is symmetry and symmetry. The harmonious buildings of classical Athens are considered by many to be one of the high points of the history of architecture. There is certainly a most satisfying symmetry here, and one that recalls the linear relations of Euclidean geometry. The importance of architecture in the Athens of Pericles is a graphic expression of the public-spirited outlook of Athenian democracy (based, of course on the labour of the slaves, who were totally excluded from it). The great buildings of the Acropolis and the Agora were, without exception, public buildings, not private residences. In our own day and age, such splendours are extremely rare. The low priority given to architecture in comparison to other arts is no accident.

In the name of “utility”, which is a polite synonym for stinginess, people are forced to live in uniform high-rise concrete boxes, devoid of all artistic merit or human warmth. These monstrosities are designed by architects, inspired by strictly geometrical principles, who nevertheless prefer to live in quaint 15th century cottages in the countryside, far away from the urban nightmares they have helped to create. Yet human beings do not generally like living in boxes. And nature knows of symmetries very far removed from straight lines and simple circles.

It is the other side of the coin of the mechanised idiocy of the production line, where human beings, in the words of Marx, are treated as mere appendages of the machines. Why, then, should they not live, herded together on big estates in concrete boxes, which are built on similarly sound “industrial” principles? The same arid reductionism, the same empty formalism, the same linear approach has characterised architecture most of this century. Here the alienation of late capitalist society expresses itself in the soulless treatment of people’s most basic need, for a clean, attractive, and genuinely human environment to live in. When life itself is stripped of all humanity, when it is made unnatural in a thousand different ways, how can we be surprised if some of the products of our so-called civilisation behave in an unnatural and inhuman way?

Here too, we are witnessing a revolt against soulless conformism and rigidity. The high-rise blocks and skyscrapers, aptly described by an English writer as the “topless towers of idiocy”, are rapidly falling into disfavour. And no wonder. They are a monument to alienation on a massive scale, a progressive slide into dehumanised conditions of life, which breeds all kinds of monstrosities. The German physicist Gert Eilenberger, asked the question:

Why is it that the silhouette of a storm-bent leafless tree against an evening sky in winter is perceived as beautiful, but the corresponding silhouette of any multi-purpose university building is not, in spite of all efforts of the architect? The answer seems to me, even if somewhat speculative, to follow from the new insights into dynamical systems. Our feeling for beauty is inspired by the harmonious arrangement of order and disorder as it occurs in natural objects – in clouds, trees, mountain ranges, or snow crystals. The shapes of all these are dynamical processes jelled into physical forms, and particular combinations of order and disorder are typical for them.

As James Gleick correctly observes, “Simple shapes are inhuman. They fail to resonate with the way nature organises itself or with the way human perception sees the world.”[49]

Long ago Karl Marx pointed to the harmful consequences of the extreme division between town and countryside. It is not a question of “going back to nature”, in the utopian sense advocated by certain ecologists, who dream of escaping from the ugliness of the present by retreating into the alleged charms of a non-existent rural paradise in a mythical past. There is no going back. It is not a question of denying technology, but of fighting against the abuse of technology in the cause of private gain, which destroys the environment and creates a hell, where an earthly paradise ought to exist. That is the central task facing humanity in the last decade of the 20th century.

  1. Quoted in Gleick, J. op. cit., pp. 116-7.