James Kunstler, in his book The Geography of Nowhere, makes a brilliant summation of the blunt force trauma Modernism (and Postmodernism, etc.) inflicted upon us:

Modernism did its immense damage in these ways: by divorcing the practice of building from the history and traditional meanings f building; by promoting a species of urbanism that destroyed age-old social arrangements and with them, urban life as a general proposition; and by creating a physical setting for man that failed to respect the limits of scale, growth, and the consumption of natural resources, or to respect the lives of other living things.

The result of Modernism, especially in America, is a crisis of human habitat: cities ruined by corporate gigantism and abstract renewal schemes, public buildings and public spaces unworthy of human affection, vast sprawling suburbs that lack any sense of commmunity, housing that the un-rich cannot afford to live in, a slavish obeisance to the needs of automobiles and their dependent industries at the expense of human needs, and a gathering ecological calamity that we have only begun to measure.

Houses as “machines for living“. A boundless, soulless admiration for all things industrial-modern-technological, for Industry with a capital I, combined with utter rejection of everything that came before. Buildings, like cogs, abstracted to interchangeable parts that can be airdropped anywhere from Rhode Island to Alaska to Hong Kong–because they are featureless boxes, coolly devoid of attachments or significant features, awaiting the occupants’ imprint. Or more often than not, no imprint at all.

Consider Kunstler’s quote carefully, dear reader, and the message it contains: Modernist ideals are where those big box stores came from, those twenty-mile long highways filled with McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, mini malls. Skyscrapers, and those featureless, four-story boxes airdropped between two-story bungalows.