Some of the finest works of architectural criticism in recent memory have been written in response to the existential cultural threat posed by modernism — Henry Hope Reed’s The Golden City (1959), Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House (1981), or Branko Mitrović’s Architectural Principles in the Age of Fraud (2021), to name just a few. Perhaps the most withering indictment of the modernist architectural movement is to be found in the Ulster-born architectural historian James Stevens Curl’s magisterial 2018 book Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism. Curl, in his own words, was attempting “to explain, expose, and outline the complex factors that have managed to create so many Dystopias in which, arguably, an ‘architecture’ devoid of any coherent language or meaning has been foisted on the world by cliques convinced they knew or know all the answers, yet demonstrated or demonstrate an incompetence with buildings that fail as architecture at almost every level and by almost every criterion.” In this, he succeeded marvelously, and if there ever comes a time when, to borrow a phrase from Plutarch, Poterunt discussis forte tenebris Ad purum priscumque iubar remeare nepotes [Then perhaps, with the darkness dispelled, Our descendants will be able to return to the pure radiance of the past] it will be thanks in no small measure to scholars like Curl, who sustained the architectural heritage of the past, and passed the torch of traditionalism on to new generations. I was very sorry to hear of the passing earlier this month of Professor James Stevens Curl, MRIA FSA FSA Scot FRIAS, at the venerable age of 88. Curl left behind an extraordinary body of scholarship, which began with The Erosion of Oxford (1977), a spirited inquiry into “how the fabric of the humbler buildings has deteriorated through blight, official policies. demolitions, and gradual changes.” He charted the deterioration of the Oxford cityscape in part through the comparison of before-and-after images that made clear the deleterious effect of harsh building styles, on-street parking, and all-around poor city planning. These sorts of juxtapositions would appear throughout Curl’s career, most memorably in his analysis of the decline of Belfast’s High Street, included in Making Dystopia, illustrating “the damage the Modern Movement could do to grain and character, typical of the way in which established geometries were destroyed by Modernist interventions that paid no heed whatsoever to context.” (RELATED: Bauhaus and the Cult of Ugliness) It was a trick he had learned from the great Gothic Revival architect Augustus Pugin, who employed that technique in his best-known work, the satirical, polemical 1836 treatise Contrasts: or a parallel between the noble edifices of the middle ages, and corresponding buildings of the present day; shewing the present decay of taste, and from Henry Hope Reed, who did likewise in The Golden City. But Curl was, to my mind, a far more perceptive and humane critic than the doctrinaire classicist Reed, who felt that, for example, the Smithsonian Institution was a “lamentable pseudo-Gothic error on the Mall.” Curl, the author of such works as Victorian Architecture (1990), The English Heritage Book of Victorian Churches (1995), Piety Proclaimed: An Introduction to Places of Worship in Victorian England (2002), and The Victorian Celebration of Death (2004), understood that the inventive, confident, and pious architects of the Gothic Revival gave us some of the most sublime architecture ever seen on either side of the Atlantic. There was something nefariously, even infernally destructive about many of these modernist architects and town planners. Curl’s cause célèbre, of course, was the counter-offensive against architectural modernism, on behalf not just of pure classicism but the Baroque, the Gothic Revival, the Arts and Crafts movements, and ornamentation and beauty in general. Like his contemporary, Sir Roger Scruton, he harbored a particular disdain for modernist heroes like Le Corbusier, an antisemite who in 1940 was positively giddy at the prospect that “Hitler can crown his life with a great work: the planned lay-out of Europe,” and Mies van der Rohe, whose resignation from Prussian Academy of Arts included a hearty “Heil Hitler!” below his signature. There was something nefariously, even infernally destructive about many of these modernist architects and town planners. Le Corbusier’s notorious “Plan Voisin” envisioned the wanton destruction of all the glories of downtown Paris, to be replaced by dystopian identikit skyscrapers, which no doubt would have begun to leak and crumble immediately, had they ever actually been built. The folly of “Plan Voisin” was rejected by the sensible Parisians, but in 1968, the imbecilic academic Patrick Abercrombie tried to do the same in London with his proposal to flatten all, yes, all of Covent Garden and throw up a hideous expanse of concrete towers. What Nazi bombers had failed to achieve, the modernists sought to carry out at their leisure in peacetime. Only a concerted preservationist campaign by local residents, local councillors, cultural figures like John Betjeman, and national heritage bodies like the Georgian Group managed to prevent an utter catastrophe for the city of London. Curl rightly saw the groundworks being laid for a veritable urban dystopia to be erected upon the ruins of a far superior civilization. As he wrote in his 2018 masterpiece, It became apparent that something very strange had occurred: an aberration, something alien to the history of humanity, something destructive aesthetically and spiritually, something ugly and unpleasant, something that was inhumane and abnormal, yet something that was almost universally accepted in architectural circles, like some fundamentalist quasi-religious cult that demanded total allegiance, obedience, and subservience. Right to the end, the Northern Irish critic fought back against this mad cult. In his last article, published by The Critic on November 2, 2025, only three days before his passing, Curl despaired of the extent to which the splendid architectural heritage of the Scottish people was being systematically betrayed. He launched one last salvo against Enric Miralles Moya and his botched Scottish Parliament Building: “for some weird reason he incorporated shapes based on upturned boats as part of the over-complicated roof-structure. Apart from the highly questionable logic of such allusions, the roofs leak, and still do.” He complained of the “excessive ‘wokery’, nannying, and insularity” on display in modern Scotland, evidenced not just in everyday politics but in the treatment of the monuments to the dead (a subject near and dear to Curl, who was a patron of the Mausolea and Monuments Trust and the President of the Friends of the Old Southampton Cemetery.) “Many tombstones and monuments,” Curl was sorry to report, are being toppled, just in case youthful vandals trying to push over memorials might get hurt, so local authorities do the pushing for them. This, together with absurd speed-limits, barriers, scaffolding, and much else of a prohibitive or restrictive nature, suggests a very disturbing tendency in contemporary Scotland that is essentially extremely destructive, a kind of suffocating, modern, controlling iconoclasm knocking the stuffing out of life itself. In this way have the Scottish, but not just the Scottish, authorities “committed an æsthetic crime, wrecking harmony, civilised environments, and the legacy of men and women far nobler and greater in every way than themselves.” There is no one who could have put it better. I will sorely miss Curl’s regular contributions to The Critic, and his book reviews, with their keen insight and curmudgeonly (but altogether endearing) complaints about the various deficiencies of captions, illustrations, and the print quality of Chinese presses. I will regret the lack of new books issuing from the wellspring of his creative mind, although it seems that at least one more treatise is on its way, a study entitled The Life & Work of Thomas Downes Wilmot Dearn (1777-1853), on the intriguing subject of a relatively obscure architect who produced such works as Designs for Lodges and Entrances to Parks, Paddocks and Pleasure Gardens (1811) and An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Weald of Kent (1814), a publication event to which I am very much looking forward, though not without a certain melancholia. All things considered, however, the passing of James Stevens Curl is no tragedy. He died full of years, survived by his loving wife, Professor Stanisława Dorota Iwaniec, and his daughters, Astrid and Ingrid. He left behind a truly remarkable corpus of criticism and a template for how to combat the demons of modernism that plague the professions of architecture and architectural criticism. His work is done, and ours continues. It would be altogether appropriate to conclude this obituary, this necrologue, this celebration of a great man’s work, with some words from John Ruskin, the Victorian critic who represented a powerful touchstone for Curl’s own scholarship: “Work first and then rest. Work first, and then gaze…” Mortui vivos docent READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky: The White House East Wing Renovations: Exorcizing the Daemons of Modernism Some Dare Call It Treason G is for Gorey