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London's Shard rising behind the Millennium Bridge Peter Nicholls/Reuters

Conservatives have long opposed Modernism, but in the video age, avant-garde buildings can become potent symbols in the hands of groups like Infowars and the NRA.

Decrying what it sees as a war on white European culture, the alt-right movement calls out the people it believes stand opposed to freedom: feminists, antifascists, cucks, SJWs (social justice warriors), and President Trumps Twitter-foe Rosie ODonnell. Now you can add architects to the list.

On June 30, the far-right website Infowars posted a 15-minute-long video titled Why modern architecture SUCKS. This foray into design criticsim by Infowarsbetter known for pushing the ludicrous Pizzagate conspiracy and for host Alex Jones insistence that the Sandy Hook massacre was fakedcomes on the heels of another video that turns well-known works of architecture into symbols of liberal decadence. Im referring to the National Rifle Associations clenched fist ad, which critics have called chilling and an open call to violence.

The aesthetic judgment in the NRAs one-minute ad is implicit, almost subliminal, whereas InfoWars launches a full-bore attack. But both bear the same message about modern architecture: It is the province of the liberal urban elite, and that it stands for oppression.

The Infowars video is not the work of the red-faced, desk-pounding Jones but of a British alt-righter named Paul Joseph Watson. Its a mish-mash of critiques borrowed from highbrow architectural traditionalists with other opinions that seem idiosyncratic to Watson. He clearly researched his subject, albeit through the keyhole perspective of globalist cultural tyranny.

Watsons basic argument will be familiar to anyone who has sat through broadsides against Modernism before. High rises and concrete are dehumanizing. Modernism is the style of totalitarians, etc. As has been noted many times before, such claims are based on a misreading of architectural history; the early Modernists had democratic ideals and aspired to improve living and working conditions for all classes in society. For backup, Watson quotes and weaves in clips of critics Theodore Dalrymple and Roger Scruton, plus Prince Charles, who in the 1980s famously dismissed one Modernist design as a monstrous carbuncle. Morrisseythats right, the mopey former Smiths frontman/spouter of controversial opinionsalso makes a brief appearance in a vintage clip, lamenting the demise of his childhood neighborhood to the strains of How Soon Is Now?

This being Infowars, Watson turns the rhetoric up to 11. The founders of Modernism were the social justice warriors of their time, he says, aesthetic terrorists. Michael Graves Denver Public Library is an atrocity. Boston City Hall is a callous abomination. The Whitney Museum in New York is an abortion of a building.

Watson appears to have a particular dislike for the Whitneys architect, Renzo Piano. The Italian Pritzker Prize winner appears on screen not once but twice as Watson accuses architects of gratifying their outsized egos. That charge is frequently laid at the feet of famous architects, but the smiling, bespectacled Piano makes a curious target, given the understated minimalism of his buildings.

Piano also designed the Shard, the crystalline supertower in central London, and it is that building that most seems to arouse Watsons ire. He shifts without a beat from condemning Brutalist concrete tower blocks to lambasting todays glass skyscrapers; for him, they are all of a piece. The latter kind of architecture he calls Postmodernist, a term he uses throughout the video to denote any building he doesnt like from the 1980s or later. (In fact, Postmodernism was a defined style that sought, ironically, to revive historic motifs.)

Watson seems to have drunk deeply of the writing of James Howard Kunstler, the fiery retro-urbanist who wrote The Geography of Nowhere and whose TED talks Watson generously excerpts. Kunstler was an early influence on New Urbanism, and Watson touts many of the principles of that movement, extolling the virtues of neo-traditional architecture and of Poundbury, Prince Charles classicizing model town in southwest England. Watson also complains (correctly!) about restrictive zoning and makes a plug for mixed-use development, not seeming to realize that that is eminently compatible with large, contemporary-style buildings, and harder to find (and fund) in areas of low-rise houses, where he insists everyone wants to live.

The NRAs ad, on the other hand, uses a somewhat different visual tactic. The spot is narrated by NRA spokesperson and talk-show pundit Dana Loesch, who lays out a series of charges against an unnamed they:

They use their media to assassinate real news. They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler. They use their movie stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again.

Over this, we see quick images of Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles (by Frank Gehry), the New York Times building (by Piano), and the large-scale sculpture Cloud Gate, better known as The Bean, in Chicagos Millennium Park (by artist Anish Kapoor).

We are never told who they are, but the shots make it clear: They are people in liberal L.A. and Chicago who swan about in fancy parks and buildings.

Perhaps the NRAs depiction of Disney Hall and Cloud Gate was just an handy b-roll choice, and perhaps Watsons animus against modern design is a personal quirk. But it seems more likely that elements of the far right are deliberately making architecture a front in the Trump-era culture wars. Why?

In one way, theres nothing new about this: Theres a long conservative tradition of eviscerating Modernism, which young fogeys can learn from and mine. In the past, the vehicle for such criticism was the magazine or newspaper column and the odd TV gig. But Internet video has opened up the field to amateur critics and made it possible to skip the textual description and short-cut straight to the offending building itself.

As a visual art form, architecture obviously lends itself to video. What easier, quicker way to connote urban elite than by pointing to a Frank Gehry building in the heart of a liberal metropolis? In a second or two, it can be framed as the symbolic opposite of an old-fashioned Main Street or historic churcha bizarre-looking redoubt where they partake of secular high culture, far from Real America (or Britains Brexit heartland).

That characterization is obviously simplistic and unfair, just as Infowarss blaming of Brutalism for the Grenfell fire in London is flat-out wrong. But that doesnt mean the idea wont stick. Over the past several years, conservatives have attacked Frank Gehrys design for the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C., as inhuman, vandalism, and a monument to Gehrys ego; these arguments won over some GOP members of Congress and have helped stall the memorials construction.

Contrary to Watson, the public doesnt hate Modernism: Witness how many 20th-century designs appear in this opinion-poll list of the countrys favorites. But the unfortunate truthand another possible reason for the far rights rediscovery of architectureis that progressive architecture is a convenient punching bag because it has a small constituency.

Architects number about 110,000 in the United States, or about 150,000 if you count junior architects working toward their licenses. Thats a fraction of, for example, the nations lawyers and doctors. The profession also skews urban and blue-state, with designers (and their bolder creations) concentrated in hubs like New York, Boston, L.A., and Chicago. This fits all too well with the narrative of an urban-rural divide.

American architects often lament how marginal their profession has become to national culture, compared to countries that invest substantially in public design. Well, architecture may suddenly be poised for new political relevance in the U.S.but not the kind its advocates would ever have imagined or hoped for.

Amanda Kolson Hurley is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.

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Why Is the Alt-Right So Angry About Architecture? - CityLab