Response to Inger Nordangård and Alfred Arvidsson

Response to Inger Nordangård and Alfred Arvidsson

Miriam Weber

In the text ‘On the Inexplicable and the Progressive in Modern Architecture,’ librarian Alfred Arvidsson sympathetically engages with the project of the Architectural Uprising (AU) based on the notion that the architectural styles promoted by them – older building styles with ‘biophilic’ characteristics – respect and represent the human spiritual side.

In a contemporary era marked by new public management, by an omnipresent quantification of all qualitative aspects, by principles of market logics defining social relations and aesthetic potential in all domains of society, I respect Arvidsson’s direct injunction to safeguard the spiritual. However, I do not see the same potential as Arvidsson does in the ability of AU to comply with this spiritual injunction, because AU draws its arguments from a positivist view of humans, spirituality, and aesthetics – a view that runs counter to the holistic perspective that Arvidsson advocates.

Although Arvidsson and AU are both right to criticise modernism’s techno-utopian fantasies and the alienating, elitist, and sometimes colonial effects of the modernist style, it does not follow from this that we should return to previous architectural styles, or to a historicist and conservative notion of beauty. This final step, based on a false dilemma between alienating socialist modernism and bourgeois soul-affirming historicism, is a conservative argumentative strategy that exploits ordinary people’s suppressed spiritual needs and sense of a loss of meaning that spring from escalating capitalist conditions, which locates spiritual fulfilment and restored meaning in an idealised past. But what is actually meant by concepts such as soul, spirit, beauty, and biophilia? It’s time for a closer investigation of the ideological uses of such terms.

Two notions of “spirit”

Arvidsson sets out by defining what he means by soul, and writes: ‘Does humanity have a soul? Something complex within us beyond the mechanical biological social creature that modernity tries to reduce us to? I for one believe that our species is ultimately a spiritual and complex being.’ Arvidsson uses the concept of soul to describe something larger and more complicated than what humans are allowed to be in contemporary society. There is here an implicit critique of the diminishing, simplifying, and reductive effects of contemporary society on human inner life, which should be understood as something greater than merely mechanical biological drives. It is this expanded understanding of inner life that Arvidsson argues should guide how we plan and build our cities.

But how would the AU respond to this proposal? What conceptions of the soul, and the ability of urban planning to accommodate it, does the AU actually offer? After a searching study of the articles available on AU’s website, I can confirm that with regards to the soul, the AU does seem positively disposed. There are mainly two specific ideas and perspectives about its significance presented there: from the first perspective, the ’spiritual’ is seen as a positive force rooted in tradition and religious contexts. Advocates of this view argue that traditional architectural styles embody this spiritual essence, promoting cultural unity and societal conformity. Meanwhile, the second perspective frames the ’spiritual’ in terms of psychological well-being, focussing on how architectural design influences emotions and mental states. This approach emphasises scientific data and research-backed design principles, such as those of the biophilic design movement, to enhance mental health, productivity, and human well-being through built environments.

A conservative notion of “spirit” based on religious or cultural tradition:

Let’s start by taking a closer look at the first perspective, the idea of the ‘spiritual’ in which the soul receives its positive hue from its original religious context, a context which is also understood as unequivocally positive. The religious conservative inflection of this view is clearly expressed in Sigvald Freylander’s 2020 text, ‘On the Architects’ Dance Around the Concrete Calf’. There, he quotes former Polish president Lech Wałęsa’s view that ‘people without religion is a dangerous kind of people’, and Freylander suggests that what Wałęsa meant is that ‘only the deeply faithful, with their need for spirituality replenished during Sunday worship, can engage in rational and practical discussions about how society should be organised, taxes used, and education organised during the rest of the week.’ While Freylander is prudent enough to not propose the reinstatement of mandatory religious affiliation explicitly, he engages in some insinuating speculation: ‘But perhaps here [in the lack of religiosity] lies, just seemingly far-fetched, an explanation for why Swedish architecture has been afflicted by an increasing degree of dystopian hopelessness and aesthetic depression.’ This is a familiar Christian argument structured by the narrative of the Fall, but the conservative flirtation with a return to religious social systems and enforced religiosity also suggests a desire for social conformity. It is a desire that tends to manifest also in discussions about cultural unity, as we can see in Mark Gelernter’s text ‘Making Room for Traditional Architecture’ from 2017, where he writes that ‘Few would argue against the desire to make our society a better place. And perhaps it is possible for architects to contribute to significant social change through architecture, or to create a new spiritual idea that is then embraced by the rest of society.’ The conservative concept of the soul is often used to suggest the restoration of a pre-global time when cultural and societal unity prevailed and can thus be considered a clear positioning on the new political ‘gal-tan’ scale where ‘tan’ describes traditional, authoritarian, and nationalist views. Appealing to the soul leads to the idea of historical values and building styles (traditionalism), society’s imposition of values and ideas on the individual (authoritarian), and cultural and societal identity and uniformity (nationalist).

An evolutionary notion of “spirit” as psychic mechanisms

The second meaning of the soul that the AU presents is based on ideas of mental illness and mental health. This meaning present in Inger Nordangård’s article ‘The Mental Disorders That Gave Us Modern Architecture’ from 2017, which argues that Le Corbusier was mentally ill and had a hereditary mental ‘disorder,’ which gave rise to modernist and soul-draining architecture. She explains that the entire generation of modernists were mentally ill due to war traumas or ‘specific brain disorders’ and claims that: ‘History tells us that modernism was the idealistic impulse that emerged from the physical, moral, and spiritual decline after World War I. While other factors also played a role, this explanation, which is undoubtedly correct, is nevertheless incomplete.’ Spiritual decline here refers to spiritual well-being and mental health. A kind of clinical psychological approach that recurs in the text ‘Principles for Harmony,’ published the same year, where the psychological perspective on spiritual health in architecture is developed and turns out to be rooted in evolutionary psychological arguments.

Nordangård seems to argue that mental spiritual states are expressed in urban development, architecture, and building styles and vice versa, that urban development, architecture, and building styles influence people’s mental and spiritual states. Regarding modernists, she writes: ‘While their recommendations for “good design” – a new world, a blank page – certainly reflected their talents, ambitions, and drive, their solutions also reflected their brains’ specific disorders.’ Conversely, she describes traditional architecture as capable of providing ‘emotional nourishment’ and describes contemporary architecture, which is perceived to give rise to unnatural and ‘conspicuous’ buildings, as a source of feelings of ‘disharmony, chaos, and stress.’ She concludes in the final paragraph that this ‘is increasingly being confirmed by modern neuroscience.’ This perspective, which suggests architecture’s role in maximizing spiritual well-being (which here means mental health), also takes on an aesthetic character in some cases, where traditional building styles are described as having a positive impact on spiritual well-being because they are aesthetically pleasing. For example, Christian Lettström argues in the article ‘Even Ugly Architecture Costs a Lot of Money’ from 2016 that ‘Beauty touches and can also generate money: something that both politicians and developers should keep in mind as it is in their economic interest.’ He further claims that ‘In addition to the economic gain, it also results in spiritual joy for the inhabitants who daily live and meet in these rooms and urban environments.’ It becomes clear here that the concept of the soul is used to give spiritual weight to happiness, joy, and well-being in the broadest sense and that this spiritually connoted mental well-being can be found in aesthetic values that traditional architecture and urban planning convey. As usual with the AU, the argumentation is construed as a polemic against modernist architecture. Lettström expresses it as a matter of course: ‘we can probably all agree that few people become happy by being forced to endure a boring and meaningless box that flutters by.’

This concept of the soul and the notion of spiritual well-being as psychological reactions to the immediate aesthetic organization of the environment have been increasingly developed within conservative architectural circles in recent years, as such notions have come to rely on a growing body of positivist (neuroscientific, evolutionary psychological, and behaviourist) research on the concept of ‘biophilic design.’ The research on biophilic design – a concept based on the idea that humans have a natural (biological) tendency to want to affiliate with other life-like or natural things – suggests that by integrating natural elements into the built environment, mental health and human well-being can be increased. The research claims that biophilic design principles and strategies, often suggesting the use of biophilic patterns or living plants, reduce stress, enhance creativity, and promote a sense of connectedness to the place. Although these suggestions by the research community follow a vague utilitarian ethics and tend to work with a quantitative (and therefore limited) concept of human well-being and mental health, the case for biophilic design doesn’t seem too ominous at first sight. However, in the hands of AU and Nikos Salingaros, the researcher whom AU seems to quote the most, the theory of biophilic design has been mobilized into an altogether ideological, aesthetic, and spiritual program promoting traditional forms of architecture which the AU present as both the real predecessors and the best examples of biophilic design. So far, however, there is no consensus within the research community regarding any connection between the psychological effects of biophilic principles and traditional building styles, so AU’s claims are solely based on wish and fancy in a manner that foregrounds the political and ideological aspect of their campaigning.

An Ideology of Harmony

What AU and Inger Nordangård mean by harmonious or beautiful architecture, can be drawn from the two notions of spirit they stand for. Harmonious or beautiful architecture means on the one hand simply conservative architecture: an imperial and authoritarian aesthetics of traditional styles typically associated with palaces, national museums, monuments, and triumphal arches with their grandiose structures, impressive scales, and symbolic elements geared to the purpose of commemorating significant national events, rulers, some national region or some glory past. On the other hand, harmonious and beautiful architecture means health-bringing architecture. This perspective is grounded in the notion that environments perceived as beautiful are more likely to make people feel comfortable, happy, and motivated, which in turn can enhance productivity and well-being. This duality of AU’s project, combining the aesthetic ‘beauty’ of traditional and imperialistic architectural traditions with natural-scientific gestures towards human health, poses some serious ethical and political questions. Firstly, it risks perpetuating sanitised or romanticised narratives of history, glossing over the repercussions of imperialism with the topic of health and, as such, reinforces one-sided historical interpretations. This tendency, often termed ‘healthwashing,’ employs health-related rhetoric to obscure and justify what in essence could be understood as an ideological project, in this case deflecting attention from the structural injustices that enables and conditions imperial projects. Moreover, the reification of cultural symbols inherent in imperialistic architectural traditions not only reinforce cultural hierarchies but also undermines efforts to foster cultural diversity and acknowledgement of the often-transnational origins and global status of cultural symbols. As such, it could be argued that the health that they supposedly are trying to achieve, is health and spiritual well-being for a wealthy European elite at the cost of health and spiritual well-being of the victims of imperialism and nation building.

As an example, The Architectural Uprising applauds the controversial reconstruction of Berlin’s Palace on the site of the former Palast der Republik and takes a clear ideological stance on architecture’s role in society. Regardless of GDR’s many times oppressing politics, the former building, Palast der Republik, had a great democratic function among the GDR citizens as it served as a free public space for gatherings and political discussion. After it’s demolition between 2006-2008, a meadow was planted where it used to stand in a prestigious spot on Berlin’s Museum Island, signifying for many Germans an absence of national pride and identity after the wars and the fall of Soviet power. Given this, the reconstruction of the Berliner Palace has become a symbol of the extreme ends of architectural neoconservatism and authoritarianism, which in this and other cases not only promotes a specific “glory” part of history and national narratives but actively destroys and erases other, undesired, historical parts. A building that engendered public gathering, debate and participation in political processes was demolished and replaced by a useless building, mostly empty today, commemorating Imperial Germany. This is frequently promoted by the Architectural Uprising as an example of architecture defending beauty, health and “emotional nourishment” (spiritually connotated). I guess democratic debate, social spaces in the public, political participation and true historical narratives doesn’t make it onto Inger Nordangård’s list of what is emotionally or spiritually nourishing.

AU’s promotion of the reconstruction of the Berlin Palace – replacing the modernist architecture of the Palast the Republik – is not merely an architectural preference but a manifestation of a particular worldview. By favouring grandiose structures and imperial aesthetics, AU suggest an appreciation for architecture based solely on aesthetics and individual gains in mental health and spiritual fulfillment, deployed of social and political dimensions. The example of the Berlin Palace thus serves as a striking illustration of AU’s ideology and position taking, often equating traditional styles both with national flourishing and individual spiritual well-being in the sense of cultural belonging and evolution-based psychological mechanisms. This is indicative of what type of harmony that can be considered figuring as a foundational motif in the Architectural Uprising and of what concept of harmony Nordangård proposes.

A harmony between national flourishment, cultural belonging, and evolution-based psychological mechanisms by means of traditional style and architecture may at first just sound like a limited idea of harmony, but at a closer look, this linking and meaning making seems familiar in the worst kind of ways. Traditional aesthetics, grandiose architecture, overconfidence in science describing psychological mechanism, and the hope to resurrect a religious sense of belonging to culture in the name of spiritual health and as a response to aesthetic and societal crises undeniably gives off some fascist vibes.

A parallel fascist example is Mussolini’s Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in Rome, also known as the ”Square Colosseum”, with its traditional and symmetrical grid facade of superimposed arches and a strong horizontal emphasis, evoking the grandeur of Roman imperial buildings as the building was intended to demonstrate the continuity between ancient Rome and Mussolini’s new empire, linking national history with the regime’s vision of cultural and national flourishment. This building and established example of both fascist and rationalist architecture was designed not just to impress the viewer with the might of the regime, but also to influence and affect the psychological state of the public — instilling a sense of awe, order, and submission to authority. By doing so, it attempted to resurrect a collective cultural identity and belonging tied to an idealized version of the nation’s past by using new scientific understandings of human psychology, a set of relations visible also in the argumentations of the Architectural Uprising.

Conclusion

Alfred Arvidsson’s agreement is indicative of how well the spiritual rhetoric works for the Architectural Uprising. Many of us feel spiritually tired, unfulfilled, and uninspired by our capitalist environment which only offers us quantities, more or less of everything (more or less years to live, more or less knowledge, more or less jobs, more or less money, more or less health). The past is a simple projection surface for ideas about a life that is qualitatively different and rich in qualities (genuine materials, craftsmanship, and manual labour). The past also works well to mobilise people longing to escape the present, but the revival of an old architectural style hardly addresses the truly tragic spiritual state that our contemporary era has us trapped in. Ironically, the quantitatively conducted research that AU starts its evolutionary biological arguments from is based on the same mechanical view of humans as the capitalist systems around us, which measure, monetise, and exploit our social relationships, aesthetic activities, and spiritual dimensions and further constitute the basis for why something like AU appears like an attractive alternative in the first place. We need to understand humans and humanity as a larger and more fussy category than what both our capitalist system, the environments it produces, and AU’s evolutionary psychology suggest. We need to think of humanity and spirituality also as social and political practices that unlock meaning and meaningful directions, which in turn define what is meaningful research and meaningful architectural styles. The idea of an isolated happy and aesthetically – evolutionarily – satisfied spirit is a modern liberal construction moulded according to the consumption logic’s first principle of desire satisfaction, and perhaps it is more regarding this novelty that we should abandon our present to look back towards a more socially and ethically driven view of humanity and architecture.

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