Beauty may famously be in the eye of the beholder, but that isn’t stopping it being weaponised in the culture wars.
In architecture and planning especially, ‘beauty’ is no longer simply a positive design outcome, but a Trojan horse word used by those on the right to discredit the Modernist-tinged post-war settlement – especially its public housing.
Despite beauty being so obviously subjective, a decades-long agenda to promote traditionalist design and architecture under the cover of ‘beauty’ appears to be finally paying off. In the UK, it is being deployed today by a network of campaigners, think tanks and government appointees aiming to change national cultural and heritage policy.
