JOLLY DAYS

Soulless Boxes

I've been reading Tom Wolfe's From Bauhaus to Our House. It is Wolfe's attempt to explain skyscrapers, the soulless boxes populating the downtowns of big cities. How could such hollow architecture, the pretensions of glass and stone, become the default?

The book is about the length of an extended magazine article. In the section I am currently reading Wolfe is explaining the way theoretical competition became as important as getting the commission and seeing the building go up:

…Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing concentric circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.

Besides being beautifully written and analytically accurate, this example of Wolfe's writing presents the most civilized example you will ever come across of someone saying, “Le Corbusier has his head up his ass.”