"The Modern Movement"

At Samizdata, Brian Micklethwait writes interestingly about The Modern Movement (but without ever defining it). But since he is discussing a BBC TV show "High Rise Dreams" prior knowledge is reasonably assumed.

"The truth is that if (even) more money had been made available than was, the devastation cause by the Modern Movement in architecture in Britain would have been even more devastating.

The Modern Movement was animated by numerous seriously bad ideas (and by just sufficient good ones to make all the bad ones catch on seriously). It which it would require an entire specialist blog to do full justice to all these errors. I'll end this post by alluding to just two such ideas, among dozens.

The Modern Movement is shot through with the idea that to put up an 'experimentally designed' block of flats and immediately to invite actual people to live in it is a clever rather than a deeply stupid thing to do. Experimental-equals-good is the equation they swallowed whole. This is rubbish. Many experiments are excellent, as experiments. But what they mostly tell you, the way his numerous failed lightbulbs told Thomas Edison, is what not to do. Imagine if Edison had gone straight to production with his first idea of what a lightbulb might be. That was sixties housing in Britain. No wonder so much of it had to be dynamited."

See the BBC's page (referenced above) for more TV on buildings.

UPDATE from "Comments"

Modern Movement Architecture (which should be distinguished, I believe, from Modern Architecture, which is not all bad by any means) is not the only cause of trouble, but it is one of them, and you let it off far too lightly. This is not an either/or thing.