Moral Relativism in Architecture
Hello, dear readers. Today I’ll be discussing modern moral relativism, and how it has incarnated itself into architecture. As a young woman deeply in love with the buildings of the past, the soullessness of contemporary architecture is something that irks and worries me. So let’s dive into it.
The above photo is of the Geisel Library, owned by the University of California. Although a technically amazing building, there is no beauty in it, no grace or elegance. It looks like something that may come from a dystopian film, and although there is charm to that, it does not inspire any feelings of holiness and joy-in-beauty. On the contrary, it inspires fear, at least in me, and that is something I can admire.
The Geisel Library seems to me to be the hallmark of the 21st century, in which strength, fear, and dystopia are blended together in concrete. The absence of religion in the West has many benefits- especially for women!- but it also brings many negativities in it as well. Young men and women operate in a secular sphere, without any moral guidance. Occasionally, this need for a moral framework leads to extremities, such as the rise of Christian white nationalist thinking and radical Islam.
After the First World War, a sense of hopelessness and pessimism permeated Western society. The end of the 20th century ushered in more futuristic architecture, architecture that focused more on convenience than beauty- for example, the Brutalist style, which was invented in the 1950s.
Let’s compare the above Brutalist building to York Minster, United Kingdom, and the Taj Mahal in India.
Although York Minster and the Taj Mahal have radically different styles, they are both eerily similar in the sense that they both have grace. Although one is Christian and Western and the other is not, there is no difference when it comes to beauty. By admiring York Minster and the Taj Mahal, we are taken out of ourselves, our minds encapsulated by the sacred beauty both buildings possess. The gleaming white stone of the Taj Mahal, its gentle domes, allow us to transcend ourselves, our minds, our characters. The same counts for York Minster and its Gothic spires and turrets. Delicate carvings and birch-like towers both feature in these two buildings.
Culture, religion, time, and space yawn between the creation of the Taj Mahal and York Minster. But both were created with a mindset that we no longer possess: a mindset intent on creating beauty, on revering a something higher than humanity.
When the BBC interviewed J.R.R. Tolkien in 1962, the famous author claimed that because we are created by God, we have to ‘sub-create’. We have to ‘rearrange the primary material in some particular form, which pleases…it’s partly aesthetic pleasing’. Many thanks to Patrick Lawrence at Ringfolk for transcribing this interview.
If we are to look at architecture and other forms of creating through Tolkien’s theological lens, we can argue that as creations of God- as extensions and products of a divine being- we feel the urge to imitate something beautiful. God, whichever God you wish to believe in- is goodness, and therefore we want to create something beautiful. Believing in a God of love and goodness prompts us to create beautiful buildings. Swap this God for capitalism, consumerism, materialism, greed, and moral relativism, and suddenly you get Brutalist architecture or hyper-modern, dystopian sky-scrapers, witnesses to the modern human’s lust for glam and money.
Axel Towers, Copenhagen.
Replace God or any other benevolent divine entity with a heinous ideology like Communism or Fascism, and you get this lump. A chilly megalomaniac fist of stone covered with the symbols of tyranny and industrialisation, radiating authoritarianism. Beneath is a fascist building in Italy- cold, sterile, and murderous. It makes me think of concentration camp buildings.
It is my theory that there is a reason why these buildings were built in the 20th and 21st centuries, and not in the Middle Ages or Early Modern Era. There is little to no reason to say that folks back then didn’t have the ability to make giant fist-like lumps out of stone, or prison-like marble infrastructures. If you can build a cathedral, you can surely build the above. But they didn’t.
Fascism and Communism are ideologies devoid of morality, save their own twisted ones. Gothic architecture, or the architecture of the Taj Mahal, is fused with godly morality, a code of laws seemingly given by a divine, non-human entity. This is quite visible when old buildings are compared to new ones. God is out of architecture, the excesses of humanity is in.
Conclusions?
It is my theory that secularisation, with all its benefits, has ushered in a very problematic by-product: moral relativism. As beauty is considered to be an elitist construct, a word employed by conservatives, anything can be art, because beauty no longer matters. Moral relativism can also take more dangerous forms: replace God with Stalin, Mussolini, or Hitler, and their own man-made, heinous codes of conduct, and ugliness is produced. Neither Hitler nor Stalin were remotely interested in creating buildings or art dedicated to the glorification of a sacred benevolent entity. On the contrary!
I am not advocating for the return to a strict religious dogma- the Middle Ages had its fair share of zealots and religious persecutions. What I want to advocate for is the abolishment of moral relativism. There is such a thing as beauty, otherwise, why would so many people visit York Minster and the Taj Mahal? There is more value to a Raphael painting than a banana on a canvas, and that lies in beauty: the glorification of something sublime that transports us out of ourselves, out of our narrow human existence. Not everything can be art.
Instead of building buildings dedicated to human greed and ideology, we must seek beauty outside of ourselves, as a representation of something divine. Only by creating with love, respect, and reverence can we make society more aesthetically pleasing. In other words: in order to bring back beauty, we must step out of ourselves, and create with the idea of something higher, and more benevolent, than our own human selves.
Maryse Kluck