A classic Theodore Dalrymple essay was published in last June’s edition of First Things reviewing James Stevens Curl’s withering critique of the unmitigated disaster that is the modernist school’s architectural barbarism.

Curl’s book is a gauntlet thrown down before a powerful establishment. Its publication has caused a stir among those who are, for professional reasons, unable to admit the obvious, for to accept any of its criticisms would be to admit to decades of architectural incompetence if not outright criminality, inasmuch as modernism was party not only to the destruction of all previously existing townscapes but to profiteering of the crudest and grossest kind.