UGLY AND ORDINARY ARCHITECTURE (148)
day's details are too sensitive for the timbre of our environment. however, at the opposite extreme, there is an individual need for intimacy and detail, unmet by Modern design but satisfied by the five-eighths scale reproductions in Disneyland, by the caricatures of human scale in the patios of garden apartments, and by the seven-eighths scale furnishings of the fancy interiors of Levittown model homes.
SPACE AS GOD
perhaps the most tyrannical element in our architecture now is space. Space has been has contrived by architects and deified by critics, filling the vacuum created by fugitive symbolism. If articulation has taken over from ornament in the architecture of abstract expressionism, space is what displaced symbolism. Our heroic and original symbols, from carceri to Cape Kennedy, feed our late Romantic egos and satisfy our lust for expressionistic, acrobatic space for a new age in architecture. It's space and light light as an element for distorting space for further dramatization. The spatial replication today of the mills of the nineteenth-century industrial Midlands illustrates the irrelevance of these borrowings. The complex diagonal clerestories and sheer glass walls and roofs of early industrial architecture responded to the need for natural light and the availability of minimum artificial light for a 12-hour working day in a latitude where winter days are short and winters are long. On the other hand, the Manchester mill owner could depend on a cool climate in the summer in the summer, low heating standards in the winter and cheap and docile labor to put up with the conditions and repair the leaks. Today, however, most buildings need windows to look out of rather than glass walls for light, because our lighting standards are higher than can be satisfied through daylight alone, and areas of glass must be kept small and ceilings reasonably low to conditioning and meet the budget. Therefore our aesthetic impact should come from sources other than light, more symbolic and less spatial sources.
MEGASTRUGTURES AND DESIGN CONTROL
Recent Modern architecture has achieved formalism while rejecting form, promoted expressionism while ignoring ornament, and deified space while rejecting symbols. Confusions and ironies result from this unpleasantly complex and contradictory a=situation. Ironically we glorify originality through replication of the forms of Modern masters. There is little harm in this symbolic individualism except for its effect on the budget, but there is harm in imposing on the whole landscape heroic representations of the masters' unique creations. Such symbolic heroism lies behind the Modern proclivity for the megastructure and for