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Roger Scruton, Architecture needs a Grammar

   By being honest, modern architects implied, buildings could help us to become so. The new city of glass, concrete, and parkland would be a city without social pretense, where people would live in exemplary uniformity and be rewarded with equal respect. ... The paradox here is exactly that of revolutionary politics: human equality is to be achieved by an elite to whom all is permitted, including the coercion of the rest of us. ... 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. ...  Read Complete

 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