Building for People

Tradition, T. S. Eliot wrote 85 years ago, cannot “be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor.” As Tom Wolfe showed in his hilarious 1981 satire on modern architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House, all the most influential early-and mid-20th-century Modernist “master” architects found the weight and trajectory of traditional architecture humiliatingly oppressive and irrelevant to modern conditions. With the German emigre Walter Gropius they wanted to “start from zero”; with the Italian “Futurist” Filippo Tommaso Marinetti they wanted to celebrate “the joy of mechanical force.” The assertion of their contemporary, Eliot, about tradition was thus—to them—retrospective, nostalgic, lugubrious.

Mr. Aeschliman is a professor at Boston University and the University of Italian Switzerland and also the founder-director of the Erasmus-Jefferson Summer Institute in Tuscany (in collaboration with the University of Virginia), now in its ninth summer.

About the Author

M.D. Aeschliman

M.D. Aeschliman is professor emeritus of education at Boston University and author of The Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism (3rd English-language ed., Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2019 and French-language rev. ed., Paris: Pierre Téqui, 2020).

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Tradition, T. S. Eliot wrote 85 years ago, cannot “be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor.” As Tom Wolfe showed in his hilarious 1981 satire on modern architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House, all the most influential early-and mid-20th-century Modernist “master” architects found the weight and trajectory of traditional architecture humiliatingly oppressive and irrelevant to modern conditions. With the German emigre Walter Gropius they wanted to “start from zero”; with the Italian “Futurist” Filippo Tommaso Marinetti they wanted to celebrate “the joy of mechanical force.” The assertion of their contemporary, Eliot, about tradition was thus—to them—retrospective, nostalgic, lugubrious.

Mr. Aeschliman is a professor at Boston University and the University of Italian Switzerland and also the founder-director of the Erasmus-Jefferson Summer Institute in Tuscany (in collaboration with the University of Virginia), now in its ninth summer.

About the Author

M.D. Aeschliman

M.D. Aeschliman is professor emeritus of education at Boston University and author of The Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism (3rd English-language ed., Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2019 and French-language rev. ed., Paris: Pierre Téqui, 2020).