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Roger Scruton, Architecture needs a Grammar

Em. Macron, Rediscovering the Path to Europe

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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 facade, and without intelligible relation to its neighbors. Although this vernacular has repeatable components, they are not conceived as parts of a grammar, each part answerable to each and subject to the overarching discipline of the townscape. The components are items in a brochure rather than words in a dictionary. ...

Because architecture is a practice dominated by talentless people, manifestos and theories of the kind the modernists proliferated are especially dangerous, for they excite people to be bold and radical in circumstances where they should be modest and discreet. The modernists discarded millennia of slowly accumulating common sense for the sake of shallow prescriptions and totalitarian schemes. When architects began to dislike the result, they ceased to be modernists and called themselves postmodernists instead. But there is no evidence that they drew the right conclusion from the collapse of modernism—namely, that modernism was a mistake. Postmodernism is not an attempt to avoid mistakes, but an attempt to build in such a way that the very concept of a mistake has no application. ...

It is one of the marvels of the modern world that human beings, having proceeded along a path that leads manifestly to error, can yet not turn back but must always exhort themselves to go further in the same direction. It is with modern architecture as it has been with socialism, sexual liberation, and a thousand other modern fads: those who defend them draw no other lesson from their failure than the thought that they have not yet gone far enough. Our present need is not for the uncoordinated and dislocated architecture that the postmodernists would wish on us but for an architectural grammar that would permit talentless people once again to build inoffensively. That is what the classical pattern books taught, and that is why there was such a thing, before modernism came on the scene, as a serious architectural education that could prepare ordinary human beings for the enormous responsibilities involved in building the environment of strangers. 

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 Cf. A comment on Scruton's text, by J. T. Henry and Roger Scruton: Modernist buildings exclude dialogue. Cf.  Victor Hugo, Variety, Eternity, Proportion: Time was the architect—Europe was the builder * J. O. y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses * Pericles Giannopoulos, The Greek line & the Greek color

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