ADBUSTERS: DAVID LACHAPELLE
MAY 2007
By Christopher Alexander

I think of it as a mass psychosis of unprecedented dimension, in which the people of Earth - in large numbers and in almost all contemporary societies- have created a form of architecture which is against life, insane, image-ridden, hollow. The ugliness which has been created in the cities of the world, and the banality and pretentiousness of many twentieth-century buildings, streets, and parking lots have overwhelmed the earth.

Much of this construction is caused by developers, housing authorities, owners of hotels, motels, airport authorities. In that sense architects might be considered blameless, since in some degree the ugliness of what has been created is caused by new relations between time, money, labor, and materials and by a set of conditions in which the real thing - authentic architecture that has deep feeling and true worth - is almost impossible.

But architects are not blameless. For the most part, architects have stood by, content to play their role as part of the twentieth-century machine. In many cases they make it worse. Rather, they gild the lily of commercial development with pretentiousness. Many architects have raised the designer-conscious fashion of building to new levels, have invented absurd ways of thinking about architecture, have altogether poisoned the earth with an abundance of terrible and senseless designs which have few redeeming features.