Form Follows Fiasco: Why Modern Architecture Hasn't Worked

From Front Jacket: "Peter Blake says the most outrageous things about contemporary architecture and city planning. And he gets away with it. Part of his success is based on his unimpeachable credentials -- he is a practicing architect, the designer of four dozen buildings all over the United States, the former editor of two influential magazines, 'Architectural Forms' and 'Architecture Plus,' and now the Chairman of the Boston Architectural Center. The ingredients of Blakes' success as a critic of modern architecture are his honesty, intelligence, independence and wit, all of which are evident in his new, irreverent, iconoclastic book. Skillfully blending documentation and illustrations -- which are rich counterpoint to the text -- and gradually sharpening polemic and humor, Blake calmly explodes the fantasies of modern dogma that most architects, himself included, once accepted. Such truisms as 'form follows function,' 'the open plan,' and 'purity of design' are exposed to quixotic precepts. Our supreme confidence in advanced architectural technology is crumbling as fast as are the buildings it created. The intricately planned, artistically designed components of the Ideal City have divided urban areas into tidy ghettos of culture, education, business, residence -- even pornography -- alienating individuals and threatening not only the economic future of our cities, but civilized aspects of life in the West as well. Form seems to have become an end in itself. As Blake wryly observes, unless the human form can be restructured, modern design will become as much a fantasy as the sum of its parts. [this book] calls for the slaughtering of the sacred cows of the Modern Movement, for a moratorium on the destruction of existing buildings and historic landmarks, and for an end to the construction of skyscrapers, new highways in developed nations, and single-use zoning. Blake demands legislation to hold building industries responsible for performance of their products, and a restructuring of architectural education into something more basic and more human. Finally, he asks for an end to architecture itself -- at least until it can be brought back to a reality, as E.F. Schumacher has put it, 'as if people mattered.' ******* CONTENTS: * Preface * Introduction * The Fantasy of Function * The Fantasy of the Open Plan * The Fantasy of Purity * The Fantasy of Technology * The Fantasy of the Skyscraper * The Fantasy of the Ideal City * The Fantasy of Mobility * The Fantasy of Zoning * The Fantasy of Housing * The Fantasy of Form * The Fantasy of Architecture * Postscript