FARCICAL ANTI-HEROES.

It might have presented as prole drift, or as a transgressive arms race where there were no limits to the crudity.  "I remember when tattoos went from being the province of middle-aged men who had survived World War II and picked up a tat on the night before they hit the beach in Normandy, and began to be worn on the arms (or butts, in Cher’s case) of 'transgressive' pop stars."

That was Ed Driscoll of Pajamas Media, meditating on the Super Bowl, but resonating with a fear of mine that there were creative people who took transgressive stances as a product differentiation tactic.  "Changing core values, though, is all about mentally disturbed people claiming their condition is actually being on the cutting edge of social evolution."

Sometimes the evidence is out there, waiting to be linked.

Recent advances in neuroscience point to another important factor: one reason modern architecture looked so different than past constructions was because its key 20th century founders literally didn’t see the world in a “typical” fashion. They couldn’t. Their brains had been either physically altered by the trauma of war or, like Le Corbusier, they had a genetic brain disorder. And while their recommendations for “good design”—a new world, a clean slate—certainly reflected their talent, ambition, and drive, their remedies also reflected their brains’ specific disorders.

In recent years, several authors and physicians have described the father of modernism, Le Corbusier (1887-1965), the Swiss-French architect, as autistic. Writers, such as the critic and psychiatrist Anthony Daniels, and the biographer Nicholas Fox Weber, have come to the conclusion that the Swiss-French architect met the diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder (ASD). They’ve chronicled his impaired social communications, repetitive behaviors, abnormal fixations (including a fascination with concrete), and apparent absence of interest in others.

“For all his genius, Le Corbusier remained completely insensitive to certain aspects of human existence,” Weber writes in Le Corbusier: A Life (Knopf 2008). “His fervent faith in his own way of seeing blinded him to the wish of people to retain what they most cherish (including traditional buildings) in their everyday lives.”

It's not that Eddie Gray could humblebrag about his mental disorders being essential bits of his personality the way contemporary hypersensitive people do, but he did come of age in an era when the Intellectual Tradition was that there was some avant-garde on the cutting edge of social evolution and discovering that bright future for lesser mortals.  We got ugly buildings, tenure music, and a nation in therapy.  There might be neuroscience to it.

Why should it matter that the people who gave us modern architecture in the 20th century had traumatic brain damage and disorders? For one, the information reframes our understanding of how modern architecture came to be. We can now better understand, at least in part, why modern buildings look so different than older or traditional ones: relationally-compromised people with atypical “fixations” and emotional regulation came up with the architectural approach, abetted by a wounded world rushing to bury the past and an economic power structure all-too-willing to profit from it.

Cognitive scientists are fond of saying “fixations drive exploration” and this statement is true whether our brains are directing our eyes to look at ads or architecture; what our brains get us to look at (or fixate on) unconsciously is what we’ll focus on consciously; with biometrics we can “see” for the first time in history how people with brain disorders like autism and PTSD don’t fixate or take in reality in a normative way. We can also conclude, therefore, that architects with these disorders couldn’t be called upon to provide the template for the buildings people need to see, to feel and be at their best.

It is also revealing to consider how the detachment people often feel around modern buildings and urban settings closely mirrors the disconnect people with PTSD and ASD often have towards others. It all makes a great deal of sense once you think about it: people who are relationally compromised can’t come up with an architecture that promotes relationships.

The War to End All Wars, the author notes, might have had something to do with it: otherwise normal people might have been better positioned to note "this is not normal" (a polite way of saying "this is butt-ugly") and our buildings would have looked better and our music sounded better.  Well, maybe not the music, consider what the music of a happy country once sounded like.