In 1955 the Pruitt-Igoe projects opened in St. Louis as a solution to crowding in the downtown. The architect of the project was Minoru Yamasaki, who would later design the World Trade Center buildings in New York City. Minoru, much like many architects of the era, was following the mantra that echoed throughout the stoic walls of architecture schools in the United States, reverberating so loudly that it pierced the ears of the creators and purveyors of classically beautiful art and sculpture, leaving modern boxes and paint by numbers in its path with price tags in the millions and supposedly beautiful buildings often confused with concrete storage facilities. Blocks and solids were the style of the day with lots of words to describe them. Most “common folk” had no clue what the words meant, what the buildings and art were, and why anyone in their right mind would ever create such spectacles; and this, according to the elites producing these geometric monstrosities, was exactly why the working class and common people needed their help.
The modernist deign of Pruitt-Igoe deviated sharply from the ornate and beautiful traditional Japanese design and architecture.
Though Yamasaki had an affinity for traditional Japanese design and its ornamentation, this influence was overwhelming and most architects in his era were taught that modernism – i.e. concrete boxes stripped down and left minimalistic – was the future of architecture. Bland, brutal, lifeless, and a full abandonment of the beauty that defined the classical architecture that emigrated from Greece and the Roman Empire throughout antiquity, culminating in Florence during the Renaissance, and ultimately leaving behind what many now consider the most attractive city in the world (myself included). Even the Etruscans, creating some of the earlier settlements in Italy, understood the impact of beautiful architecture and the pleasantries of living in communities adorned with it – but thousands of years later, from their bully pulpits and ivory tower offices within our highest universities, the modernists would preach a direct refusal of continuing this tradition of creating beauty and instead replacing it with boxes.
Even those individuals that built Matera with their primitive tools, which dates back to the Paleolithic era in the 10th millennia BC, knew a thing or two about beautiful architecture.
Yamasaki followed suit by eliminating any ornamentation in his design, leaving what looked like three boxes glued together with a flat roof, no porches, and not even a spec of beautiful surfaces along the building. Linear box shaped windows act like the holes in a sponge, absorbing any semblance of beauty.
The Pruitt-Igoe projects look incredibly simple, as though a second grader could draw them. Yet, one would assume his or her teacher would tear up such a drawing due to its lack of redeeming qualities. The Pruitt-Igoe projects followed a classical modern theme: it was a geometric collection of steel and concrete with some interspersing glass. And by geometric, it was basically a giant box. A massive box. The structure had all the elements described by the architect and pioneer of modern architecture, Le Corbusier.
The Pruitt-Igoe encompassed all the elements of modern architecture and the teachings of Le Corbusier, while espousing all those of traditional and classical architecture. Would you like to live here?
The building layout even followed a Le Corbusier idea of placing “streets in the air” by creating covered walkways on each floor connecting the various sections. This building of the future was coined the “machine for modern living,” further emphasizing the importance the group of architects were placing upon themselves, so much so that they were playing the hand of God as they molded their lives around these structural cities for the worker and lower-class citizens that accumulated within our nation’s cities. The workers living in the concrete structure, however, had other ideas about the definition of “living.” Most fled to the suburbs to avoid their incarceration in the Pruitt-Igoe. The only people left to fill the cubicles were new immigrants from the south looking for work.
As Tom Wolfe describes in From Bauhaus to Our House,
“They moved from areas of America where the population density was fifteen to twenty folks per square mile, where one rarely got more than ten feet off the ground except by climbing a tree, into Pruitt-Igoe’s fourteen-story blocks.”
Le Corbusier’s Weissenhof in Stuttgart, Germany.
Design from Above
A quick glance at Le Corbusier’s work may raise some questions. Mostly white, concrete, square, and bland, these edifices promote an unnervingly deep feeling of emptiness. It is difficult to find the front door in nearly all of these Soviet block-style houses, and many appear more like pill boxes from the World Wars or bunkers used to escape a nuclear attack as opposed to a building to live or work in, and certainly not a building to love and cherish. There are many theories to explain the strange tendencies within the design of these houses. For instance, Le Corbusier and similar modernists had recently seen the horrors of World War I, visualizing a large degree of death and destruction that the world was unfamiliar with, and psychological issues and post-traumatic stress disorder plagued many of those spectators. Others, like Le Corbusier, had autism spectrum disorder, which unfortunately left him “completely insensitive to certain aspects of human existence.” However, what is clear is that flat, concrete structures are stoic in design, but also stoic in their considerations of local societies, customs, culture, and humanity. The buildings are blank slates. Le Corbusier and others called it Purism, or the creation of objects represented as elementary forms devoid of detail.
This is not a modern building, but rather a pill box from World War II, with a heavy concrete structure that allows someone to live in for periods of time and avoid gunfire.
This is not a pill box from World War I, but rather a modern building with a heavy concrete structure that nobody in their right mind would want to live in for any period of time.
Le Corbusier’s background may help explain this clear and purposeful attempt to promote cleansing and purity, as he sympathized with the Nazi party and, unsurprisingly, was anti-Semitic.1 His efforts to purify went far beyond buildings. For example, in a letter he wrote of Hitler:
“If he is serious in his declarations, Hitler can crown his life with a magnificent work: the remaking of Europe.”
Much like Hitler, Le Corbusier was a staunch believer that the world must follow his attempts to purify and remake, only his redo was not people, but rather cities and buildings:
“I am possessed of the color white, the cube, the sphere, the cylinder and the pyramid… Take the whip to those who dissent.”
If his actions were not pompous enough, his words help to add additional layers, as he would label individuals – particularly the low-class workers – and force them to live in certain areas of his top down cities based on this identification. In his words, “not all citizens could become leaders. The technocratic elite, the industrialists, financiers, engineers, and artists would be located in the city centre, while the workers would be removed to the fringes of the city.”
Perhaps less surprising after one sees the colorless, austere, concrete boxes with low ceilings and small windows in his designs, Le Corbusier’s theory largely impacted the Soviet Union during the beginning of the 20th century, and he eventually traveled there to pitch some of his designs. While his impact there was lasting, he would lose a design contest with his Palace of the Soviets, infuriating him. Even the Soviet’s apparently felt that Le Corbusier’s style was entirely too bland for them, as they mocked his building design, calling it a “congress hangar.”
The Buriti “Palace” Government building in the Le Corbusier inspired top down designed city of Brasília, Brazil.
The “Palace” of Assembly in Le Corbusier’s top down designed Chandigarh, India.
While one can dismiss Le Corbusier and his elitist and fascist views as an artifact of the past, the impact they had on future architecture and city design is unmistakable. While it takes a lot of gall, pomp, and narcissism to openly promote the denigration of those beneath you as so simpleminded, backwards, and unintelligent that you must create the world for them, it takes even more ego to keep going with this ideology when all the data tells you of your mistakes. After Le Corbusier’s multiple failures, including the Soviet Union and concrete prison-like cities of Brasilia in Brazil, and Chandigarh in India, his principles and debeautifying efforts did not slow.
The Pruitt-Igoe projects remain one of the largest examples of this push for lack of beauty, but also the crushing, top-down, elitist, design and construction of living quarters for those too simple-minded to make decisions on their own.
The Mysore Palace in Mysore, India, combines elements of Mughal, Hindu, Rajput, and some Gothic style, thus preserving the local culture and not trampling on it.
From Architecture to Our Dietary Recommendations
At this point, you may be thinking what does any of this have to do with dietary recommendations? Well, years later the members of these same universities who pushed other drab and dark modern approaches on to their proletariat underlings, trampling thousands of years of culture and beauty in the process, continued to push so hard that the approach entered the foods we once cherished as a society. Now, instead of promoting ugly buildings that zap the soul out of life, the push was to remove any remaining beauty in the traditional cuisines throughout the world that, like Classical Architecture, developed throughout several thousand years during a long process of trial and error.
The symbolic simple shapes (to guide us simpletons) remained; only instead of boxes, they turned to triangles, like the infamous food pyramid, the later short-lived but more elitist MyPyramid Food Guidance System, and circles, like the rebranded pyramid known as ChooseMyPlate. The new elite replaced delicious meats and cheese, vegetables soaked in olive oil, polyphenol-rich red wines, and other traditional, delicious, and beautiful foods with lifeless, soulless replacements. The less cooked the better. No fat, cheese, meat, salt, wine, or other foods that proletariat shepherds and farmers, like Leonardo Pesce cherished, just soulless plates of grains and vegetables – no butter allowed on it either. And like Le Corbusier, they would “take the whip to those who dissent,” especially if you were within the medical field.
The less opsa the better, as one should bore their tastes into submission, much like walking through a city of modern concrete boxes versus a stroll through Florence. The base of the pyramid endorsing a hearty – and wholly unnecessary – six to eleven servings of grain, pasta, cereal, and bread and more modern recommendations continue to chastise fat and meat. However, the metaphorical concrete may be getting even heavier from the top-down pressure of newer and even more outlandish food recommendations.
Over the past several decades, multiple attempts to Le Corbusier our diets have been attempted across the world, with the strongest push by the recently created EAT Lancet Commission. Incredibly similar to the soulless architecture shift from the classical style that can be seen throughout Italy and the Mediterranean areas, soulless food recommendations have recently and rapidly trampled over the rich, delicious, appealing, and healthy Mediterranean diet. Much like utilizing incoherent verbiage to describe their drab boxes of concrete, the same verbiage was applied to the Mediterranean diet to pretend that it contained merely raw vegetables and grains, ignoring soppressata from southern Italy, Prosciutto from Parma, Comte cheese from Eastern France, chorizo from Spain, Lamb and Feta from Greece, or the deep, dark polyphenol-rich red wine from all of them. There is even now a “green” Mediterranean diet, further following the verbiage/jargon strategy to throw words around to redefine reality. Much like the purposeful removal of arches, columns, and hand-cut stone from the world’s beautiful buildings, attempts to destroy any semblance of beauty and pleasure by the internally miserable elite are out in the open for the world to see.
Just as the beautiful buildings, art, and sculptures around Italy and the Mediterranean were replaced by the elite with a higher version of smart design described by all kinds of smart words, so too the beautiful, delicious, varied diet of the cultures around the Mediterranean Sea miraculously became a worldwide example of a low-fat, soulless eating pattern; no more were Italians spending hours enjoying delicious, colorful, and beautiful foods at the dinner table. (The dinner table, and the beauty, joy, conversations, and bonding of families that it fosters must be eliminated.) No more chewing the fat.
Even the website of the latest top-down elite sanction on the rest of us common folk EAT Lancet, tells us it is a commission that “brings together world-leading researchers in nutrition, health, sustainability, and policy from around the globe.” Unsurprisingly, EAT Lancet displays some of these healthy and sustainable meals on their website, which immediately remind of us the modernists tenets.
For instance, several recipes are listed, with the first three including remarkably Le Corbusier-like “meals.” Their website boasts “delicious” recipes like Arepa with Plant-Based “Dominó” Filling, including chia seeds, flaxseed, oats, salt and pre-cooked white corn flour or “arepa” flour. Another one is pea pod noodle salad, which includes pea shells, buckwheat noodles, julienned veggies, and coriander root, stem and leaves. This remarkably square, colorless, flat and drab Lentil Paratha easily allows one, as pictured below, to see how incredibly close it is to an edible Yale box.
As I peruse the recipes, I can feel the excitement of Le Corbusier rise as the thousands of years of history and culture that led to my family’s traditional southern Italian cuisine – the cuisine that we shared over thousands of dinner table conversations – is replaced with a grey-brown Lentil Paratha. This recipe was delivered as part of the Reimagining Food Systems event, another top down planning attempt to design and build a system mandating how we should eat. To no surprise the Rockefeller Foundation, a billion dollar organization that strongly promotes top down planning for us nonelites, appears to be footing the bill for much of this new push to mandate which foods we are allowed to eat.
The EAT Lancet website even goes as far as telling us that our diets should mimic the ultimate top down approach leaders of the world, China. In their words, “countries like China and Indonesia have current consumption patterns aligned with the model necessary to protect health and the planet.” From mandates of blind positioning to new mandates of meals we are allowed to enjoy, Le Corbusier smiles as attempts to crush our souls continue from high above the clouds in the ivory towers. Adding to Le Corbusier’s elitist delight, reports show that the EAT-Lancet diet is unaffordable for at least 1.6 billion people.2 Le Corbusier was never one to take the considerations of the poor into consideration, so why should EAT Lancet?
Going Bottom Up Instead of Top-Down
Over the past centuries, other housing projects have utilized principles of classical architecture or have taken into account local customs and culture, and perhaps the most important factor of all, beauty. Many of these projects still stand today, and many would actually be considered high end housing if located in the US. It would be interesting if dietary discussion followed this pattern, but unfortunately, they rarely do.
This Beguinage in Kortrijk, Belgium, served as communal housing for women, much like a convent.
The “modern” housing projects, however, refused and rejected any local customs or culture. The consistent theme of these projects was their creation by the knowledgeable elite utilizing their omnipresent intelligence to design the lives of those in the bottom and middle of society (or as Le Corbusier referred to them, the middle-middle). This always included soul-sucking designs that never considered the human element or the fact that humans, and not robots or ants, would be the ones living in and among these buildings. And consistent with the ivory tower university theme, oftentimes the designs were rooted solely in theory without practicability by architects who rarely actually built houses, but merely advised others on how they should design and build houses through untested theories. Much like other academic areas and progressive agendas, talk trumped action. After Le Corbusier finished one building, Frank Lloyd Wright, who took modernist styles and imbedded them with beauty and nature (thus was hated by the modernists), was quoted as saying:
“Well, now that he’s finished one building, he’ll go write four books about it.”
Wright, whose life was dedicated to creating beautiful homes that molded to nature, refused to even meet Le Corbusier and his modernist colleagues. Wright didn’t cave into the verbiage; he saw what was going on and knew the ramifications of uglifying the world.
The modern convent of Sainte Marie de La Tourette near Lyon. Nuns used to hit me on the regular at my Catholic grade school. Having them live here would certainly be payback.
The designs lacked beauty and were so dehumanizing that those individuals who were forced to live in these brave new worlds attempted to escape. The designs all looked the same. The theorizers of modern architecture preached through their higher-than-the-commoner knowledge, yet the simple creations of these geniuses at work all looked incredibly the same. They also seemed incredibly unintelligent, simple, and easy to design. Much like taking feces, placing it on a canvas, calling it art, and slapping a price tag of several million dollars on it (yes, this has happened more than once, and yes, people actually bought the art), these buildings were incredibly simple, cheap, uncreative, and all almost exact replicas of each other – though the barrage of incoherent words to describe the “masterpieces” were often much more creative, albeit nonsensical. According to Tom Wolfe in From Bauhaus to Our House:
“At Yale the students gradually began to notice that everything they designed, everything the faculty members designed, everything that the visiting critics (who gave critiques of student designs) designed … looked the same. Everyone designed the same … box … of glass and steel and concrete, with tiny beige bricks substituted occasionally. This became known as The Yale Box.”
Yale even commissioned modern architect Louis Kahn to add onto their university art gallery, which was an intricately designed Italian Romanesque palazzo. Kahn, with the precision and skill set of a second grader, added a grey concrete box directly next to the classical building which, according to Wolfe, “could scarcely be distinguished from a Woolco discount store in a shopping center.” When Kahn was questioned about the soulless, drab, and incredibly ugly building, he turned to neologisms and jargon, exclaiming that the building was an “unconcealed structure.” If you didn’t understand it, you merely weren’t smart enough…
From their bully pulpits and ivory tower offices within our highest universities, the modernists would once again preach a direct refusal of continuing this tradition of creating beauty and instead replacing it with drab, boring, soul-sucking, and anxiety-provoking. Policy trumped posterity. As Wolfe described of Le Corbusier:
“Always the ceilings are low, often under eight feet, the hallways are narrow, the rooms are narrow, even when they’re long, the bedrooms are small (Le Corbusier was always in favor of that), the walls are thin, the doorways and windows have no casings, the joints have no moldings, the walls have no baseboards, and the windows don’t open, although small vents or jalousies may be provided. The construction is invariably cheap in the pejorative as well as the literal sense.”
[stextbox id=’custom’ color=’fcfcfc’ ccolor=’000000′ bgcolor=’000000′ cbgcolor=’000000′ bgcolorto=’000000′ cbgcolorto=’000000′ image=’http://colinchamp.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/CC-Icon.jpg’] Corbusier’s fascist ideologies leave little surprises when considering the goals and effects of his work, and also the crossover into Soviet style block house design and implementation during the spread of communism throughout Russia. The homes and buildings of Corbusier were perfect creations to crush the willpower and soul of the common people. I distinctly remember living next to these compounds in Kosice, Slovakia when I worked in a hospital there in the summer of 2003. The concrete blocks arranged like a linear Lego set could be seen across the hillside from my back window. Even a glance at them provided an uncomfortable feeling deep in the pits of my stomach, which worsened when considering that actual human beings lived in these dehumanizing prisons. [/stextbox]
Beyond the drab buildings that were created for the nonelite of society to live in, the rules were even more incredible, pushing top-down ideology to its limits. Some buildings mandated whether blinds were allowed, others allowed blinds only to be open, closed, or left halfway to keep a symmetric look. Apartments were policed to enforce these rules. No derivation from the top-down directions were allowed. Inhabitants in structures like the Seagram Building were out of luck if the sun was at an angle that did not accommodate the allowed positions of the blinds – these buildings were not designed for the people who lived and worked in them, but rather to show the genius of the creators. When considering the top down mandates, which the masterminds would refer to as details, one of the architects, Mies van der Rohe, went as far as stating that “God is in the details.” As he was the one making the details, one can assume what he thought of himself. No longer was God in beauty or the beauty of nature, God was now creating Yale boxes.
The inhabitants of Pruitt-Igoe failed to see this God in the details as well. They eventually pushed back, with many vocally mandating that the buildings be destroyed and they live elsewhere. They even chanted “Burn them down!” Their pleas and cries worked, as the buildings were imploded in 1972.
The Tsentrosoyuz, headquarters of the Soviet trade unions.
When the Proletariat can no longer take the dehumanizing rules from above
Returning to the Pruitt-Igoe projects, the result was consistent with the many attempts throughout human history of the elite to manage the middle and lower rungs of society through dehumanizing, progressive design that tramples on thousands of years of culture. During these same thousands of years, local cultures and available food sources helped shape our diets and the foods our bodies became adept at processing. Superseding both with mandates from the intellectual elite – mandates that totally ignore our history, culture, and human element – is a recipe for disaster on many levels. This is playing out all too well these days.
You can drain the life out of people for only so long before they cannot take it anymore. At the Pruitt-Igoe projects, the soul removal process lasted for about two decades before the inhabitants, and those around it who had to stare the soulless, lifeless, and beautyless creature in the eyes on a daily basis, could no longer take it. No human being with a soul who experienced true beauty, love, and happiness would ever look at a concrete prison like Pruitt-Igoe and exclaim “God is in the details.”
Just like no human would stare down at a plate of ivory tower-sanctioned tasteless, soulless, and cultureless food and agree that they know what’s best for us. The Pruitt-Igoe-like dietary recommendations pushed upon us are – like the concrete block that was imploded in 1972 – reaching their expiration date as cultures and societies around the world, and within the melting pot of the United States, realize that these are absurd mandates surrounded by gall, pomp, elitism, and narcissism to openly dictate our diets.
The planned communities of Le Corbusier and his contemporaries ignored the very people who were supposed to live and work in them and therefore failed as “machines for modern living.” The top down, atrocity of dietary recommendations is closely following the same pattern.
For them, there is only one solution:
“Burn them down!”
References:
- Brott, S. The le Corbusier Scandal, or, was le Corbusier a Fascist? Fascism 6, 196–227 (2017).
- Hirvonen, K., Bai, Y., Headey, D. & Masters, W. A. Affordability of the EAT–Lancet reference diet: a global analysis. Lancet Glob. Heal. 8, e59–e66 (2020).
© 2020 CDR Health and Nutrition, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Thank you for another thought provoking article — nourishment for the soul
Thanks!!
Very interesting! I appreciate the reminder to think about architecture and that i now have some idea of le Corbusier’s (horrible) impact. Thanks!
Thank you! Yes, the impact was unfortunately decently widespread, but it seems the architecture world is coming back to its senses!
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