Modernism was an ugly movement that most ignored. I live in a modern house, and I’m moving to another. But both took the idea of shape and were designed by the practical man. Modernism was never that. It removed all tradition to build the idea, the shape.
Which was generally unlivable. The owners of my house added a porch and sunroom: I have remodeled the kitchen. The idea of the original designer are ignored.
Because we make the arches and armour and even the spices of China or the poems of the troubadour fit within our climate, language, taste and soil.
And modernism denied all this.
No. It’s an impudent falsehood. Men did not
Invariably think the newer way Prosaic
mad, inelegant, or what not.Was the first pointed arch esteemed a blot
Upon the church? Did anybody say How
modern and how ugly? They did not.Plate-armour, or windows glazed, or verse fire-hot
With rhymes from France, or spices from Cathay,
Were these at first a horror? They were not.If, then, our present arts, laws, houses, food
All set us hankering after yesterday,
Need this be only an archaising mood?Why, any man whose purse has been let blood
By sharpers, when he finds all drained away
Must compare how he stands with how he stood.If a quack doctor’s breezy ineptitude
Has cost me a leg, must I forget straightway
All that I can’t do now, all that I could?So, when our guides unanimously decry
The backward glance, I think we can guess why.Clive Staples Lewis
I had a lovely ‘old school’ architect design a dwelling for me. I said I had the wood to make the windows and joinery. “Great” he said “Aluminium is just muck. Vulgar, utilitarian”
They shrink in summer and swell in winter. But I love them. They live.
But your place is beautiful.