Being stuck at home can be claustrophobic. In the First World War, the Defence of the Realm Acts made international private travel almost impossible. And the result was to stimulate a ravenous appetite for what Auden later called a “sunburnt otherwhere”. E.M. Forster found himself thinking “There are times when one longs to sprawl over continents, as before.”

As soon as they were able, writers began to sprawl. Gerald Brenan went to Andalucia, Robert Graves to Mallorca, Norman Douglas to Capri, Laurence Durrell to Corfu, Julian Bell to Wuhan and W.H. Auden to New York. People wondered if there were any writers actually left in this country after 1918.

Of course, in the last century, the new mechanics of travel facilitated means of escape. One of the defining books of the modern era was 1957’s On the Road, Jack Kerouac’s hymn to transience and mobility experienced with the help of an automobile (in this case, a Hudson). “Climb that goddam mountain!” was Kerouac’s advice. You can’t mountaineer while working from home.

The longing for elsewhere, the need to return somewhere, is surely so profound that it’s tempting to describe it as instinctive. In this sense, homesickness is actually related to the Wanderlust. The Babylonian Captivity, when the people of Judah were exiled, is the locus classicus of homesickness: an intense yearning to be elsewhere.

We have recently had our own dreams of Zion. In 2020, by the River Thames, we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Mediterranean weather and going out to restaurants. Has the appetite for “abroad” ever been keener than it is today? Have we ever wanted to escape with more energy and commitment?

But “abroad” is a concept of real meaning only to islanders. Depending on which departement he lives in, a Frenchie can walk into Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Italy or Spain. But the islander’s borders exist in the mind as much as on the map: to an islander, everything is abroad.

Arriving in Calais and rolling off the car ferry, there was always a sense of infinite possibilities not available at home. Vistas were limitless, destinations unbounded. In a few hours, you could be anywhere. In my case, as a young adult travelling alone, when French air was perfumed by disques bleues and the petrol smelt different, my wheezing and rattling Citroen took me often to Burgundy.

I can recall now the profound sense of freedom found in a little auberge in, say, Savigny-les-Beaune. A corner table, a book, a mid-range bottle and a dream of being somewhere else tomorrow. And if that freedom was tinged with a little sadness about people left behind, then that simply made it more intense.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt knew a great deal about displacement: “Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no-one knows you and you hold life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.” Quite so. Isn’t this exactly what “abroad” offers?

But there are economic arguments too. Never mind the psychological freedom, abroad has often been cheaper than home. When Alec Waugh made his first round-the-world tour in 1926 he discovered that living on an ocean liner for an entire year was cheaper than living in his London flat. There really is nothing new under the sun: in 2020, the more adventurous WFH generation, frustrated by the privations of home, found they could live in Fuertaventura not Earl’s Court. The home office can be a beach. Where you can sprawl.

But in any case, the concept of “home”, in design terms, is changing. The autonomous car we are promised will replace my creaking Citroen. Here is a place you can eat and sleep. And work. Restless and intelligent, the autonomous car will always be on the move. And when it acquires a WC and a shower, your need for a static home with bedrooms and kitchen and bathroom will be diminished. The term “digital nomads” will acquire new meanings. And suddenly a three-bedroom semi seems a very quaint version of “home”.

Thinking of a dire upbringing in the Gothic South, the novelist Carson McCullers wrote: “I go home often to refresh my sense of outrage”. Of course, it doesn’t have to be a sense of outrage that’s refreshed. If you were more fortunate in your upbringing than McCullers, going home often might refresh your sense of history and charm. That’s the perspective being away offers.

But be it ever so humble, there’s no place like abroad.

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Rather than a tearful urge to return to a dreamworld imprecisely located in distant space or time, “homesickness” is edging nearer to the sense of “cabin fever”, that destructive mania brought about by too strict a confinement within four mean walls. And for too long.

We make our environments and then our environments make us. The signal text of the Garden City Movement was The Art of Building a Home, published in 1901. Here we read that, “The influences which our common every-day surroundings have upon our characters, our conceptions, our habits of thought and conduct, are often very much under-rated.” Yes indeedy.

Yet, as a wandering youth I remember the original sense of homesickness well. I’ll never forget that clammy wistfulness attending early—possibly over-ambitious—travels abroad as an independent adult. Sitting, aged 18 and very much alone, on the Île de la Cité, certain I was soon to die of appendicitis, I felt the physical twinges and the emotional pangs. But did I want to go back to the home I had made such efforts to escape? I am not sure I really did.

The kindliness of parents and the comforts of home were not what I wanted, or not what I wanted at that time. The Île de la Cité was where I really wanted to be even if it made me feel exquisitely vulnerable and sad. The ruefulness probably had another source, not yet identified. Something I am—we all are—still perhaps looking for.

If not the recent prison of Government fiat, “home” is what exactly? How do we define it? “Home” has a more fugitive sense than is conventionally believed. No-one reads Theodor Storm nowadays, but he is good on this subject: his home is defined by a person. “Ich gehe in die Welt hinaus/Wo du bist, bin ich zu Haus.” Whenever I go out in the world, Wherever you are, I am at home. That works for me.

Meanwhile, new dimensions of “home” are being discovered. Who’s not utterly up-to-here with domesticity after nearly a year of politically mandated incarceration in its alleged sweetness? Kafka once described a cage looking for a bird. Well. Here we all are.

And let’s not forget the concept of domesticity, at least as defined by design, is a fluid one. And of recent invention. Our idea of home is pretty much a Victorian one: indeed, about 90 per cent of what we regard as tradition, public schools for example, is actually a product of the 19th century.

Even in the Renaissance, there was no fixed idea of what a “home” should be. Research into auctions in cinquecento Italy suggests that concepts of domesticity, at least as defined by material things, were fluid and fragmented. Even fixed architectural features—doors, window cases, chimneys and so on—were under continuous revision and for sale.

But something in the tormented psychology of the Victorian middle-classes demanded that things be fixed. In a world of turbulent values, it was surely comforting to have, at least, the architecture and furniture static. The home was a haven, an escape from public anxiety and a theatre for the expression of personality through decoration.

The Modernists rebelled, as Modernists were inclined to do. Le Corbusier, after studying the catalogue of a plumbers’ merchant and doing a lot of plane-spotting, decided a house must be “a machine for living in”. In his 1965 essay “A home is not a house” Reyner Banham took this notion to the limit.

He explained that you didn’t need walls and a roof if you were surrounded by efficient Mechanical & Electrical services. Francois Dallegret did the illustrations: a naked hominid is crouched in a structure defined not by masonry, but by microwave antennae and satellite dishes.

We are there now. By about 1985, an ordinary car, a Ford Escort, say, descendent of the Model-T that “enthroned” the ordinary American citizen, offered a higher standard of living than most houses. Air-con, excellent sound-system, ergonomic seats. Who has these benefits at home? Someone with £10,000 to spend could enjoy them in a new Ford.

The maverick Italian designer Ettore Sottsass, a disruptive wizard whose second language was irony, demanded: “Why should homes be static temples?”

Why indeed? Our popular concept of home is not much more than a Victorian status relic, as redundant now as the anti-macassars, gasoliers, brown furniture and elephant foot umbrella stands that furnished it.

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It’s useful to attempt a definition. To call someone intellectual is not to say they are intelligent. Nor even academic. An intelligent person follows patterns of thought and behaviour that are adaptively variable to changing circumstances. As Mrs Thatcher, no intellectual, said: you can prove you have a mind by changing it.

Instead, intellectuals tend towards conformity. Nowhere was this more gruesomely obvious than in the wince-makingly self-aware collective of the Fifties that called itself the New York Intellectuals. With none of the fine demotic style of the New York Yankees, this preening group included Dwight Macdonald (editor of Partisan Review), Norman Podhoretz, Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow and Clement Greenberg.

Their enthusiasm for Meursault-Marxism led to a dreadful rigidity in thought.  So much so that Trotsky said of Macdonald: “Every man has a right to be stupid, but comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege.”

The intellectual is what used to be called a Man of Letters, a term dating from the time when literacy was not common thus to possess it a mark of true distinction. To confirm any suspicion that intellectuals are often dead white men, I have two favourite exemplars from the 20th century: George Steiner and Bruce Chatwin.

Both were public intellectuals which means they were authors of popular non-fiction books who were not sportsmen, cooks or comedians. Or, at least, not comedians of the television sort. Hilariously, the polymath, polyglot Steiner reached his teens without realising that not everyone grew up being trilingual. I suppose you could call him an intellectual snob.

Chatwin was a travel writer of marked intellectual disposition. Here’s a revealing anecdote. Travelling in Australia with a companion, he once stooped to pick up a dark brown crystalline object evidently formed by the human hand. He held it up to the light in sacred contemplation and extemporised with wonder: “This is surely a rare tool used in the ritual circumcision ceremonies of the indigenous Doolbong people of the Northern Territories.” His jaw-dropped, wide-eyed companion replied: “Nah, mate, it’s a sandblasted shard of a Castlemaine XXXX bottle.”

Australia, a civilisation with little enthusiasm for the bogus, provides an interesting test for the presence of the intellectual mentality. Listen to the 1961 hit recording of novelty song “My Boomerang Won’t Come Back” by the Cockney comedian Charlie Drake.

An intellectual would reference the lyrics’ debt to the Myth of the Perpetual Return, a recurrent motif in anthropology. They might also wish to discuss the role of gyroscopic procession in the aerodynamics of a rotating wing. By contrast, a mere academic would note that the record was issued by Parlophone, made at Abbey Road Studios and lasted in its original form 3’22”. And, incidentally, produced by George Martin in his pre-Beatles moment. Meanwhile the instinctive intelligence would simply declare it to be cheerful kitsch.

There’s another characteristic shared by intellectuals and this is the tendency towards lofty quotation. Most often cited are the unreadable Hegel, the unreadable Kant, the unreadable Nietzsche. Nicely, Henry Miller, author of the epically obscene Tropic of Cancer, described Hegel as “the acknowledged cornerstone of the whole nutcracker suite of intellectual hocus-pocus”.

The French have a greater tendency towards intellectualism than the empirical British. There’s the old joke about the Sorbonne intello saying: “It’s all very well if it works in practice, but does it work in theory?”

This was all brilliantly skewered in Alan Sokal’s Impostures Intellectuelles of 1997, an academic hoax about the ”transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity” and in Pierre Bayard’s 2007 Comment Parler des Livres qu’on n’a pas lus whose title invites you never to read it (while remaining a temptation boldly to cite it in an intellectual fashion).

But maybe we underestimate the British contribution to World Intellect. We have had Shaw, Wells, Keynes and Russell. Today, we have A.C. Grayling and Will Self, although some may wish to debate their precise global status vis-à-vis Noam Chomsky and Umberto Eco. On the other hand, there is the gardener Alan Titchmarsh who left school at 15 and is, for my money, a finer source of wisdom and insight than anybody in the preceding paragraphs. Humour too.

Wasn’t it Voltaire who said what we really must do is “cultivate our own garden”?

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There is a tendency to disparage instinctive behaviour as feral rather than learned, but that’s not true. Instinctive responses are acquired only after a process of trial and error. Once bitten, twice shy. Intuitions do not arrive ex nihilo.

Instinctive Man trusts his own responses. He does not want to footnote his feelings nor peer-review his preferences. He is free because he thinks for himself. Great minds do not think alike. Great minds are always singular. As Flaubert advised, when you hear conventional thinking: “Thunder against it!”

It’s this singularity that make instinctive behaviour so much more interesting than intellectual conformism. If I say Instinctive Man is an idiot, I only mean to chase the term back to its original sense: to the Greeks, “idiocy” meant uniqueness, someone who stood apart. This sense is preserved in our own word “idiosyncrasy”.

Instinctive Man has opinions which, the Thesaurus says, are beliefs, convictions, ideas, persuasions, views, feelings, inclinations, sentiments, biases, speculations, suppositions, estimations and judgements. Thus, all that is required to be a fully-functioning human-being, as opposed to paid-up foot-soldier of the intelligentsia.

Intellectuals are not allowed to be imaginative, but Instinctive Man is bound to be. And has more fun the while. Victor Hugo thought “imagination is intelligence with an erection”. And who would not want such a thing? Whereas Picasso (left) believed that if you could imagine something, it was already real.

Instinctive Man will give you an answer promptly. He has opinions. But Intellectuals are cautious about jumping to conclusions, but jumping is very good exercise for the mind. As Henry Kissinger knew, only fools expect ever to have perfect knowledge. And waiting for perfect knowledge to be acquired licenses every form of procrastination. In Flaubert’s posthumously published novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet, the two dim heroes try to assemble all the world’s knowledge. Of course, they fail.

People tend to say dismissively “but that’s just your opinion” as if an individual opinion were of less value than received collective wisdom. By definition, an instinctive pattern of thought avoids the perils of groupthink. The mathematician G.H. Hardy wrote: “It is never worth a first-class man’s time to express a majority opinion. By definition, there are plenty of others to do that.” In this reading, the first-class man is an idiot.

And Instinctive Man enjoys risk and accident. Indeed, actively flirts with the former while enjoying the spectacle of the latter. He is always prepared to challenge the lazy orthodoxy whether it be sourced in the Guardian, the Sierra Club, the Politburo or the National Trust.

If you are instinctive, you find chance beautiful. Raymond Aron might well have been a pur sang Sorbonne intello, but he nonetheless conceded: “Intellectuals cannot tolerate the chance event, the unintelligible, they have a nostalgia for the absolute, for a universally comprehensive scheme.”

Talk of absolutes and comprehensive schemes to my ear sounds like totalitarianism. So it is appropriate that Eric Hobsbawm, an intellectual who never abandoned his support for Marx’s “comprehensive scheme” while blithely ignoring Stalin’s gulags, the Katyn Massacre, the Harvest of Sorrow and Holodomor (where perhaps four million people died), wrote: “The intellectual responsibility (is) to help create an intelligent citizenry”. Speaking on behalf of the citizenry, I say: what arrogant, insulting tosh.

Anarchic instinct is so much more interesting than the rigours of the intellect. Put it this way: how excited would you be when told by a host or hostess at dinner: “You’re really going to enjoy X, (s)he’s a real intellectual”? This would mean looking forward to a ball-breaking, patronising, smug, conceited table-mate probably completely lacking in either empathy or humour. Very likely badly dressed as well, since intellectuals with their great superiority rise above the frivolity of superficial things.

How much more fun to hear: “You’re really going to enjoy X, (s)he stole a painting from the National Gallery then cartwheeled naked down The Mall.”

None of this is to disdain the life-of-the-mind. But it is to say that the clique of self-elected, self-defined intellectuals offers only a very limited idea of how wide and deep the mind is or can be. It’s poets who are the true legislators of the world, not the intellectuals. Not for nothing is the value of “intellectual property” almost impossible to determine.

Really, in the contest between intellect and instinct, it’s a matter of whether you prefer the literati or the dilettanti. I’m certain only of one thing: it’s the instinctive, impulsive, whimsical and careless dilettanti who enjoy themselves more.

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The same teacher summarised my life potential by saying: “Charm alone will not get him through”. One hundred-per-cent wrong.  Charm alone has got me almost everywhere.  And all I can remember from my Greek lessons is to say: “The judges chased the stewards through the countryside”.  That gets you nowhere when ordering a purslane salad in a taverna.

Not for that reason alone, but I have always rather disliked the classics. There is something about Greek that lends itself to a spurious precision with showy scholars which I have always found annoying.  Those footnotes which say Fermoriad xii, 26, Eunuchiad ix, 82 were incensing.

And while I adore Patrick Leigh Fermor as much as the next man devoted to leventeia—the bawdy spirit of boozy and restless youth he wrote of with such passion—I once threw a book of his across the room. I explained to my wife that if I had to read “Geranian megarid” another time, I would scream.

And those municipal art galleries I used to haunt as a youth (when I should have been doing Latin prep)! The plaster casts and Roman copies of Greek sculpture gave me a chill that sucked all energy out of my heated enthusiasm for art. Of course, the most familiar god in these frosty halls was Apollo: the outstanding sucker of enthusiasm. I disliked Apollo from the first time I saw him.

He is best-known as Apollo Belvedere, the famous copy of a lost Greek original discovered in Rome and on display in the Vatican since 1511. His limbs shine bright, his tongue gives oracles, the poet said. His curly locks are banded by a strophium, signifying divinity. He is naked apart from his chlamys, a robe cast with maddening insouciance over his shoulders, signifying that he was a bit of a prat. If nakedness can be prim, this is it. Apollo was born not with a silver spoon in his mouth, but with a golden sword in his hand. I ask you.

As a son of Zeus, he was extravagantly entitled. With his sister, Artemis, he invented archery and is often shown carrying a bow. And his portfolio was extended to include poetry, music and sunshine. Indeed, Apollo was fond of flying in front of the Sun in his chariot. And Apollo became the ideal of male beauty, although of a controlled and moderate sort. Today, he would be selling Nespresso.

But the Apollonian ideal passed into our consciousness as a representative not of an aesthetic or a divine personality, but as a metaphor of order and convention. In the Apollonian system there is no excess. It is all under intellectual control to the extent that he was even championed by the saintly St Thomas Aquinas.

Nevertheless, the all-under-control Apollo was not above a bit of bloodthirsty vengeance if crossed: when the satyr Marsyas challenged the divine prig to a music competition, he lost and was skinned alive for his contempt.

(This Flaying of Marsyas is a familiar subject in the history of art. The outstanding example is the late-period Titian in the Archbishop’s Place in Kromeriz, Czech Republic. Iris Murdoch thought this the best European painting ever.)

Apollo has his architecture. Among the most perfect Greek temples are the ones devoted to him. My favourite is in Bassae. It was copied by the Grand Tourist John Foster, Junior and a version of it stands in the canyon surrounding what is now Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral. Proof, if you like of Apollo’s enduring reach.

Moreover, Apollo has become an eponym for classical values as opposed to the more messy romantic ones. In 1915, the great Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin codified Apollonian values as “linear” in opposition “painterly”.  Or, if you like, a distinction which became: Mondrian versus Pollock.

Mondrian existed on a carrot-based diet, disliked trees and lived in apartments that were blindingly white, spare and uncomfortable.  His was a sort of sterile perfection.  And so too was Apollo’s.

Meanwhile, countless fire-protection companies brand their alarm systems “Apollo” in deference, perhaps, to his tight fit with Helios, the Sun god who he knew from fly-bys.  This seems to me more damning evidence that the cult of Apollo is founded in caution and conservatism, not boldness and innovation.

Someone once asked Jean Cocteau what he would save if his house was burning down. He answered: “The fire.” Apollo would not have understood. He would have pressed the alarm button long before the blaze took control.

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Apollo had his tiresome lyre, which he plucked to make epicene music for his blameless followers. But Dionysus surely inspired Beethoven’s raucous Seventh Symphony which Nietzsche described as the “apotheosis of the dance”. Yes, I know it’s a Greek word, but I don’t think we have anything like as many apotheoses as we need.

If you are going to have a classical god, Dionysus is much more amusing than Apollo. Who could not be impressed by someone whose cult was of such persuasive power that the women of Athens went every year to Parnassus to hold orgies in his honour?

With Dionysus we are in the colourful territory of ecstatic libations.  There really is, one imagines, nothing quite like a good orgy. The more so when a part of the Dionysiac theory is that drinking, dancing and sex are evidence of theolepsy, of being “possessed” by the gods. (Greek words really are rather useful.)

And the Dionysus brand was influential: a franchise even. The Etruscans took up his cult and enjoyed lounging on luxurious flower-embroidered couches, drinking powerful wine from heavy silver cups while being attended by naked slave-girls. Additionally, Dionysus was often followed by satyrs which, if Attic Red Figure vases are anything to go by, had permanent erections. You would not say that about Apollo’s lot.

What began as a “harmless vineyard cult”, according to Burgo Partridge in his rackety study A History of Orgies (1958), developed into the spectacular Roman Bacchanal, as Dionysus merged into the person of Bacchus, an even more worldly entity. Most happily, in later European art, any depiction of a Bacchanal licensed nudity . . . and all that tends to go with it.

As evidence of how emotionally impoverished we have become, I am very short of real-time orgy experience. Still, I suspect the orgy has been downgraded since Bacchus’s day. So far from tanned, toned and fit nymphs and lusty satyrs, I suspect orgies, if they exist at all, are rather as if the check-in line at Ryanair has been involuntarily stripped bare. Sometimes at Stansted, I feel Dionysus is not tending to his legacy as assiduously as we might wish.

But, because I have read the great Jean Seznec, I am cautious about bad-mouthing gods. His La Survivance des Dieux Antiques (1940) says they are still around and did not die when Christianity became established. I am sure they are.

I know this because there is a family house on Skopelos with a view of Olympus from the kitchen; and there’s really not much doubt about Apollo’s presence there. I can wave to him as I chop basil. And the house is quite near Mount Othrys, mountain of the Titans and the Kingdom of Achilles. (And also the source of the best oregano.) You can sense their presence in Thessaly, if not in STN.

“But where is Dionysus?” you ask. He was the last of the twelve gods to ascend Olympus, his arrival delayed because of wandering the world teaching winemaking. So the essential distinction is this: you have Apollo, a Mr Tidy Paws. And Dionysus, an itinerant wine merchant, immoderate outlaw, enthusiastic and exhilarating. At his worst he was mad and destructive. Yet for all his licentiousness, Dionysus was not a vengeful god.

Apollo has his temples and statues. Dionysus, on the other hand, is better remembered for his rites, although we can admit that drunken frenzies rarely stimulate great building design.

But drunken frenzies do bring some benefits. Euripides believed: “The blood of the grape lightens the burden of our mortal misery”.  I think we all accept that. And I like the old lines from an anonymous poetaster:

Better than the Scriptures can
Wine reveals God’s plan to Man

For “Wine”, read Dionysus. As Nietzsche knew, he is the promise of life itself: sometimes violent, often flawed, reliably unpredictable and endlessly compelling.

And the rest of the legacy of Apollo and Dionysus? Abe Silberstein’s NASA branding, of course. By contrast, if only in matters of style, Gucci has a range of “Dionysus” handbags. Of course, Dionysus also lent his name to a legion of wine bars, facilitating, for example, the introduction of hummus to Tyneside.

What do you want?  Law and order, familiar forms and manners? Or the delirium of an unchecked creativity that continuously reinvents itself? Predictability or excitement?  Impossible, if you think about it, to imagine a wine bar called Apollo.

Jackson Pollock was a Dionysiac painter: a brawling drunk, abusive of booze, a man who died in a car crash of his own careless making. But Jack the Dripper’s pictures are joyful and exuberant. He might have had a death-wish, but his paintings are The Life Force.  Another example: Porsche is Apollonian since it is an argument about pure technical supremacy. Meanwhile, Ferrari betrays a Dionysiac commitment to massimo edonismo.

Always wise to let a feminist have the (second to) last word. Camille Paglia said: “Apollo is a tyrant, Dionysus is a vandal”.

For once, I’m going for vandalism.

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But when it comes to architecture, Potus is tragically misguided. Not just the nausogenic conquistador kitsch of Mar-a-Lago (pictured) or the glittery Versailles throne in Trump Tower (he likes “hard shiny things”, a decorator once explained).

No. It’s in his attitude to classicism. A reverence for the architecture of Greece and Rome is forever the default position of conservative taste, from the late Roger Scruton to the future King Charles III.

And recently leaked papers from Trump’s White House reveal that henceforth, federal buildings—courthouses, prisons and so on—must be in a classical style. This is the equivalent of grabbing the architectural establishment, which tends to be modernist, by the pussy.

The critic Sainte-Beuve memorably defined the classical in literature as “universal and permanent”. But in architecture, the Roman architect Vitruvius is the definitive source of the classical spirit, even as he drew on Greek examples.

Vitruvius defined the architectural orders and declared that the purpose of building was to create “commoditas, firmitas and voluptas”. Clearly, there can be no argument—practical or aesthetic—against commodity firmness and delight. But to suggest, as the peculiar trio of Trump, Charles and Scruton do, that a cornice here and a column there make a good building is a lazy travesty of the subtle and complicated process of building design. Lipstick does not enhance pigs.

Of course, there is no gainsaying that some of the world’s greatest buildings are classical. It would be hard to argue against the Parthenon. And who would bother trying? When Victorian Liverpool presented itself as the Athens of the North, magnificent neo-classical architecture was a helpful promotional device.

Very beautifully, the repertoire of classical architecture’s details was borrowed from primitive wooden structures. The triglyphs and metopes of the entablature are reflections in stone of wooden beam-ends and the pegs that retained them. The flutes of a Doric column are reminiscences of the gouges made by an adze when shaping a tree trunk.

But, why Mr President, would you want to replicate in concrete on a jailhouse in Chattanooga, TN, an effect created millennia before by a carpenter in the Peloponnese? Why would an Atlantic City hustler want to be mistaken for Pericles? Why indeed.

Because it is so easy to copy, classical architecture can quickly become sterile and formulaic. As it was intended to be. And this was why John Ruskin damned it so. The “universal and permanent” can soon become repetitious and inhuman. Indeed, slightly bonkers, maybe, but Ruskin likened classicism to industrialisation: dehumanising. Ruskin hated Rome and loved Venice: St Peter’s, the house of the Vicar of Christ, he found pagan, while the oddities and quirks of Venetian Gothic represented the best of the human spirit.

And then there is the question of survival bias. Classical buildings that remain have been sun-blasted and wind-blown for centuries, leaving them gloriously austere in aspect. But as the archaeologist and architect Jakob Ignaz Hittorff discovered in his travels around Sicily, classical buildings were originally painted with gaudy colours. This might well appeal to the vulgarian in Trump, but would the Prince of Wales—teleported back to Bassae in the 5th century BCE—be exalted by the reality of a Greek temple that was blue, scarlet and gold, populated by drugged-up shrieking maenads and lascivious hetaerae?

And let’s not forget dictators. From Hitler to Stalin via Ceaușescu to Trump, there is something in formulaic classicism that appeals to the authoritarian mentality. Stalin enjoyed bogus monumentality while Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, specialised in a terrifyingly chilly Nordic neo-classicism. At Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, you will find someone dressed as a Roman centurion in the lift. That seems to me unhealthy.

Ruskin’s was an extreme view. Classical proportions will be with us forever because the Golden Section satisfies a human appetite that has now been confirmed by neuro-aestheticians with their MRI scanners: the 8:13 ratio pleases because it approximates to the human field of vision.

But the argument against classicism is this: we do not speak Latin any more. Great architecture arises out of particular circumstances of site, purpose, client, public. A pediment and volute are really besides the point. So too are stylobates, abacus, guttae and dentils.

So. Classicism overrated? I can think of no precedents in a democracy where the executive has imposed an architectural style. But this is an executive that believes injecting disinfectants is a sound anti-viral procedure and that all Mexicans are rapists. You can tell the quality of an idea by the company it keeps.

This article is taken from the May/June 2020 issue of Standpoint. To subscribe to the print and digital editions, including a full digital archive, click here.

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Tom Wolfe lampooned modernism masterfully and mischievously in his 1981 squib From Bauhaus to Our House. Because of the modernist imperatie to spurn decoration and gain inspiration from engineering: “Every child goes to school in a building that looks like a duplicating machine replacement parts wholesale distribution warehouse.”

But it’s a bit more complicated than that.

It was the poet Arthur Rimbaud who said: “Il faut être absolument moderne.” For the first time in history, from about 1870 there was a compulsion to make poetry, art and architecture which owed nothing to tradition, but were, instead, uniquely expressive of contemporary sensibility. But concrete poetry made a less lasting impression than concrete architecture.

Modernist architects were infatuated by industrial materials and processes. This led to some craziness. Le Corbusier insisted a house should be a machine-for-living-in, but his trophy designs were, in fact, all hand-made. It is elegiac to see photographs of work-in-progress on Le Corbusier designs with labourers painstakingly using medieval tools to ape factory effects. The absurdities continued. The architect Denys Lasdun explained that the super-fine finish achieved on the hated concrete of London’s National Theatre was actually more expensive than Carrara marble.

When the critic Reyner Banham coined the influential term “brutalism”, the reference here was not to feral aggression, but to “béton brut” which is French for raw concrete. In the modernist playbook, rawness was considered evidence of honesty. And since for modernists, architecture had a moral character, honesty was a good thing. But a house inspired by an aeroplane was as much a poetic fantasy as columnar flutes in masonry inspired by woodworking.

Of course, certain daft inconsistencies in the modernist homilies were overlooked by its apologists. Truth to materials? What does that mean? What truth does PVC beg to express? Form follows function? It was Ruskin who pointed out that the most beautiful things in the world—lilies and peacocks were his examples—were also useless. Meanwhile, some very unlovely things, North Sea oil rigs, for example, are very useful indeed.

But modernism represented a thrilling return to order after the aesthetic chaos of the 19th century when competing styles from architectural history brawled for attention. The ur-modernist Mies van der Rohe, the last director of the Bauhaus, in fact based many of his designs on the neo-classical architecture of Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The Seagram Building on Park Avenue is, in every respect save its want of volutes, a classical building.

Modernist boosters, Nikolaus Pevsner for example, liked to present the new architecture with its insistence on functionalism as a Hegelian progress towards the inevitable. But this was soon exposed as a fiction. There is nothing inherently functional about right-angled metal. In some cases an overstuffed sofa is more ”functional” than a galvanised stool.

But the white box and angle-iron chair were a passing phase. Le Corbusier, the machine romantic, soon devised a proportional system he called Modulor and this was based on the human body. He also very soon passed out of formal austerity to the complex romantic designs of Ronchamp and La Tourette. And he wrote, unforgettably, the best ever definition of building design: “Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in light.”

And Frank Lloyd Wright agreed. Modernism is a state of mind, not a style. It is, Wright said, making the most of contemporary possibilities. Rather than imitating what has happened in the past.

In fact, modernism is the most complete expression of the will to design, a definition of what it is to be human, of making buildings which are appropriate, efficient, comfortable and, if at all possible, beautiful too. To be a modernist is to believe that tomorrow just might, possibly, be better than today. And that today is certainly better than yesterday. Looking always to the past is no more sensible than driving a car using the rear-view mirror alone.

The glory of the modernist mentality is that it is optimistic. It revels in the beauty and the opportunity of the here and now and the tomorrow. The Prince of Wales might want to live in a neo-classical house, but he would not want to fly in a neo-classical helicopter. Nor, I imagine, would he much enjoy Palladian-era healthcare. Someone once said what is the one word that neutralises nostalgia, that defeatist yearning to live in the past? Anaesthetics.

Modernism certainly got itself a bad name. But terrible buildings—Grenfell, the French banlieues, American housing projects—are terrible not because they are modern but because they are terrible. Stupid too. It’s a savage category error to condemn a civilised sensibility because of the errors at the margins. It is like condemning football because there are football thugs.

And here is survival bias again. The foetid stews and slums of classical Georgian England do not exist to impair a vision of a dreamworld of fine proportions and enchanting vistas. Only edited versions of the past remain. And not so much merely edited as exposed to Darwinian principles of survival. We only have evidence of the best, not the worst.

So. Modernism underrated? It is not so much underrated as misunderstood. Those pioneer modernists were a peculiar lot: Bolsheviks, sun-worshippers, vegetarians and free-lovers. One of them believed in the “hygiene of the optical”. But actually, it was hygiene of the soul. Modernism simply acknowledges that the compulsion to make new and better is a defining characteristic of civilisation.

This article is taken from the May/June 2020 issue of Standpoint. To subscribe to the print and digital editions, including a full digital archive, click here.

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