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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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I think you are going too far in trying to link everything bad that modern elites do to socialism/communism/other bogeymen of the Right. The biggest blights on Western cities tend to be planted there not by socialists, but by multibillionaires and conglomerates who have the money and connections to force through their vision with the antisocial chutzpah of a Randian protagonist. Meanwhile, the communist hipsters and left-wing college students tend to congregate on leafy Gothic Revival campuses (only disrupted by the occasional piece of glass blobitecture that's probably called the Bill and Melinda Gates Building) and in cozy book/coffee shops that would make Alexander proud. Compare the stark neoclassicism and opulence that Stalin decked Soviet cities in to Union Station, the Port Authority Bus Terminal or really anything about the NYC metro.

These observations are not consistent with anti-human architecture being a consequence of communism or socialism. The simpler theory is that both bad architecture and socialist rhetoric are enduring fashions among Western elites, without necessarily having any particular relation to each other except for the most basic commonality that useful elite fashions must be inaccessible to those unwilling or unable to invest time and money and be open-ended to keep the competition going.

I googled 'Peter Eisenman socialist", and it brought up a 2004 interview where he specifically says that "most of my clients are Republicans, most of them are right-leaning. In fact, my client in Spain for the cultural center at Santiago de Campostela is the last Francoist minister", and that his biggest critics are leftists.

And I have the most rapport with right-leaning political views, because first of all, liberal views have never built anything of any value, because they can't get their act together.

Seems a bit silly to suggest that he's part of a grand Marxist conspiracy now, doesn't it?

I find this public process about what monument we should build in downtown at the WTC site an aberrant one, because since when does the public choose? I would think that what you just said to me would lead one to believe that we ought to listen to the voice of the people as to what we should build, and I'm not convinced that you're not the liberal in the room and I'm not the conservative.

Conveniently, he echoed my own thoughts on the issue!