Every other week when talking architecture I’ll get the “this is rich people’s architecture! Bad!” Now you have to understand that these arguments aren’t new, and they have existed since the first Marxist minion declared it immoral to build anything better than prefab warehouses

The irony of it is how the same people who say this will usually calumniate modernism, but this is precisely a modernist argument. Modernism at urban scale was largely the preserve of Marxist-adjacent architects being ecstatic about building a great utopia for the proletariat

It is these people who most often and most virulently attacked architects who were continuous with classicism and its taste, like Mies van der Rohe. Mies was constantly attacked for his expensive work by people who had internalized the idea of Poetry being inherently immoral

In order to address these arguments we need to understand that the majority of people in the west have their basic assumptions run on centuries of Christianity, the greatest ode to the preeminence of ethics over aesthetics, morality over poetry

Marxist sympathizers differ from serious Marxists in that they understand Marxism as a moral project instead of a critical framework of analysis. They are latent Christians, which is why they do not engage critically but religiously, even when parading religiosity as criticism

Someone like Mies, on the other hand, operates on fundamentally different metaphysical assumptions than a religious man or an ideologue. There is no just and unjust. There is only art. The telos of life and of man as its agent, in his understanding, is the work of art

The religious man’s hierarchy of values is reversed, for here aesthetics, here poetry reigns as the ruler of life. This is classicism. The radical denial of politics that ensues is the most difficult part to digest for priests in ecclesiastical robes and plainclothes alike

Mies, a great classicist, utterly rejected politics. He would work with anyone who would let him build, be it morally objectionable to moralists or not. He only cared to put his work in the world. He understood, as Dante put it, “Come l’uom sé eterna”; “How a man becomes eternal”

When an interviewer objected to his Seagram tower being built in bronze and roman travertine, he replied: “Are you paying for it?” This isn’t a clever quip. This is an organic aristocrat genuinely not understanding why he should not create what he deems great if he can

It is this kind of ‘master morality’ that most hurts the Christian and the faux Marxist, and it is through this lens that you must understand the people who create and the people who enjoy the kind of architecture that elicits disdain in the priest—the Pyramid and the Pantheon

The response of the aesthete to the priest, uttered with the most intimate innocence, with the candor of a child, in the utmost fullness of their poetic rapture: “I don’t care”