Driving up to a concrete block punctuated with strips of dark windows, with purely functional window doors and framed with the obligatory pots of green shrubs that have as much personality as your dish scrubber… then walking into an angular grey and white foyer with fluorescent lighting and industrial carpet the shade of belly button lint before marching down a featureless hallway to your desk… Sound familiar? Sound deflating? How inspired do you feel to work at such place your the company / community / city council built? You can thank the International Style and its cheapification for those specific sensations.

The International Style of architecture, born out of the Modernist movement, came into being in the 1920s-1930s in Europe, the US and Canada, but became the prominent style to use in government, municipal and private sector buildings in the post WWII era, especially in the 1950s-1960s. It was supposed to represent industry, progress, and modernity, and, after the war, also a sense equality by focusing on function over form. As Western empires fell and the world healed, many countries and companies were keen to project a sense of forward movement and success in the present or near future. The speed and economy at which these box buildings could be thrown up using glass, steel and sooooo much concrete, often at impressive scale, projected a sense that this new world order of peace and shared values could only point in one direction – up.

Function over identity and inspiration

One key aspect of this building style was elimination of ornamentation, decoration, and in many cases, colour, in favour of the purely functional. By making buildings minimalist, utilitarian, functional and modular (essentially rectangles on top of rectangles), the focus could be on the work that needed to be done inside that space – that work would provide the mental colour and inspiration. Yet, by removing decoration or general visual interest, you are consumed only with the tactical “function” of the building and not the values, vision or significance behind that function. In a sense, the humanity was being stripped out of the endeavour. Once a sense of place makes you feel out of place purely because you are a breathing meatsuit, it’s easy to disconnect with the high ideals that were behind it all in the first place.

Quicker, cheaper, disposable

Now there are plenty of Modernist architecture lovers out there that will scream at me about the vision of Corbusier, the daring of Bauhaus, the impressive, unavoidable dominance of the glass curtain walls that enclose the Seagrams Building in New York. I get it, those examples represent the height of the movement. But these examples do not showcase the point I’m trying to make. My beef is with the result when Minimal Viable Product (MVP) capitalism misses the original point just to make or save a couple of bucks, completely ignoring the longer lasting psychological and political impacts of this approach on the community this blight sits in.

The International Style, and much of modernist / rationalist / austere styles of architecture were favoured not just because they were often quicker to throw up, but because the building materials and effort required to build with them was much lower. And capitalism doing what capitalism does keeps asking, “Can we make this faster, cheaper, smaller and still just functional enough?” Buildings in these styles started to be so cheaply built they ultimately became disposable without obsessive upkeep. And because they were so stripped back of decoration, personality, and in many cases stripped of the original the large, airy spaces that let light in, who was going to care enough to be obsessive about the upkeep?

If this is what “Modernism”, a style so embraced by the idealistic post-war era, represents, it’s not a far leap to see how many people could see those ideals as another set of paper-thin promises delivering nothing much better to the working 90% than the Rococo extravagance of the Gilded Age. The difference being at least those more ornate times inspired aspiration, they celebrated beauty, craft and human connection – so much so pre-Modernism buildings garner far more support for preservation, even the more pedestrian buildings, because the human touch is tangible, relatable. One feels like a human with thoughts and ideals when walking in those buildings vs cogs in a large, faceless wheel of utility.

The long trudge into work

Now, again, for those people thinking I’m a Modernism “hater” – I’m not really. There are fantastic, aspirational, and awe-inspiring examples of the International Style – I’m quite a fan of the United Nations building in New York (though I do wonder how much of that is the building itself or the mission of those working inside it..)

What starts to grate is the counterbalances of the original values vs subsequent execution of the International Style movement, especially after the 1970s – a combination of the industrial revolution taken to it’s most extreme of de-naturalisation, de-humanisation combined with a drive to diminish empire and fascism by making everything functional and generic – a sense of space that denotes equality, democracy, secularism through straight lines and globalised sameness. The International Style is partially called that because it was intended to be… international. One architectural style to rule them all – globalisation in thought and community spaces that could sit any natural environment it was thrown into. Your community’s, history, uniqueness and connection to each other and the natural world around it are seen as quaint blockers to progress, capitalist expansion, forward movement, global interconnection, with tendrils reaching into democratic ideals themselves.

But what I’m really a “hater” of is “Temu International Style” – a fast fashion version of aspirational architecture that is built to be demolished in 10-20 years. And if the building is falling apart or is becoming increasingly drab and oppressive within that time, how do people working in such a space feel about the work they do? How do  clients coming into that building feel about the service they’ll receive? I mean, honestly, when was the last time you went to a DMV  building that wasn’t a depressing grey box of emotional death?

And, in the case of the DMV, as you sit in that endless queue of bureaucratic drudgery, you may be consumed with a feeling of being undeserving of anything better than functional – a seemingly post-War-specific sentiment. This enshitification of architecture and lack of consideration of public spaces can start to stir larger, philosophical waters of discontent, even if those waters sit in one's subconscious.

If you are constantly encountering similar feelings of deflation and quiet desperation in the places you spend the most time working in or doing the necessary parts of life; places lacking in visual and spatial consideration, connection or care about the humans within them, how can that not affect how you view the values of the world around you? The values that brought this deflationary environment to life? If the execution of post war ideals of progress, modernity, equality, function and efficiency leave you feeling cold, disconnected, devalued, and generic on a global scale, it’s not a far leap to lose faith in the promise of those original values. As with anything in life, the ideals don’t matter if the execution of them is shitty.

So what?

Just as Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic Movement contended that the beauty of one’s physical environment can affect one’s mental, emotional, and by extension one’s political, state of mind, you might ask yourself if “Temu Modernism” is a less consciously acknowledged, unspoken, undercurrent driver of the anti-democracy, anti-capitalist, anti-globalisation sentiment being seen in the Western world? If equality visually manifests as bland, cheap, emotionless and ubiquitous, can we be surprised if political movements that reference the glorious past with its glorious, handcrafted, human-exalted design and ornamentation stirs the souls of the neglected, the frustrated and the visual bored?