Bart-Jan Polman —

It is a masochistic heresy, this secularized belief in a biblical deluge that in our time has taken the hearts and minds of our administrators, a mania, comparable to a cult of death that once ravaged the Easter Islands.¹

—Thierry Baudet

It is Wednesday, March 20, around 11 p.m. Elections have been held in the Netherlands, and I decide to watch the “victory speech” of the party that gained the most seats. These are not general elections, which decide the composition of the House of Representatives and, by extension, the government, but rather elections for the Provincial States.² Yet these are also significant on the national level, as the elected members decide on the makeup of the Senate—the body that has to approve all new legislation.

These elections are also a barometer.

Listening to the twenty-minute speech of the victorious party’s leader, I am struck by the rhetorical role given to architecture in the pursuit of a xenophobic and anti-European agenda. The roles that architecture plays in such politics are well known—yet it is not the rhetorics of a “wall” that strikes me (although to be sure, there’s plenty of border closing in the party’s agenda), nor does the speech rely on the architectural metaphors (the houses, chambers, and commons) by which politics often operate. Rather, the architecture and urbanism that is discussed in these twenty minutes is discussed primarily through its aesthetic appearance.

Thierry Baudet, a thirty-six-year-old politician who holds a PhD in the philosophy of law from the University of Leiden, is giving the speech. He is the leader of the Forum voor Democratie, the party he founded in 2016 and that—based on this election, almost three years after its founding—is the largest party in the Netherlands.³ Right-wing populism currently counts for over a fifth of Dutch votes, beating the previous “record” achieved in the 2002 elections, which followed the assassination of Pim Fortuyn.⁴

Standing on the steps of Hotel Figi’s atrium in Zeist for a crowd of supporters, Baudet mentions the word architecture for the first time about one and a half minutes into his speech:

[We are standing] in the midst of the debris of what was once the greatest and most beautiful civilization the world has ever known, a civilization…that reached all corners of the world, that was full of confidence, and that created the most beautiful architecture, the most beautiful music, the most beautiful painting that ever existed under the stars.

This civilization, Baudet argues, is being destroyed by those who ought to protect it: universities, journalists, recipients of subsidies for the arts, those “who design our buildings,” and the current administrators (generally dubbed the “party cartel” in Baudet’s appearances, although not this time).

Those who design our buildings.

For the most part, the logic is all too recognizable for anyone who has followed populist resurgences across the globe these past few years. The creation of an “elite” enemy and the equivalent Bannonesque foes—safe spaces, the media, the (Dutch version of the) NEA, the proverbial “swamp”—go hand in hand with the rhetorics of decline, of what Baudet once controversially called a “homeopathic dilution” caused by immigration.⁵ What seems different in the case of the Forum voor Democratie, however, is the way in which architects are specifically called out and directly implicated in this perceived decline. If you, the architect, feared for the real agency that you-who-designed-our-building have in the world—fear no longer. It seems architects are still as implicated as any other elite. (And so, by the way, are urbanists: “People don’t believe in the Netherlands anymore… People don’t believe anymore in our official holidays, our heroes, our traditional urbanism.”)⁶

These ideologically driven attacks on architects and architecture did not emerge all of a sudden with Baudet’s recent political successes but fit within an overall pattern that can be traced throughout his earlier career characterized by polemics, sexism, and hyperbole.⁷ (He once remarked, “[Rem] Koolhaas in my eyes is the biggest criminal against humanity.”)⁸ It is a history in which a number of people played key roles, but one clearly stands out: Roger Scruton. As the recently appointed (and more recently sacked) chair of the UK government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, Scruton claimed that the Grenfell Tower fire wouldn’t have happened if the Tower “hadn’t been so ugly” in the first place.⁹ Scruton is also the British philosopher of aesthetics who was one of Baudet’s advisers on his 2012 dissertation, The Significance of Borders.¹⁰

A review of Scruton’s writing on modern and contemporary architecture reveals a limited awareness of modernist historiography and a particularly singular and aesthetic view of modernism.¹¹ His perspective can effectively be summed up as opposed to most things that do not feature the “classical vernacular,” and with the certainty that buildings should have boundaries. That he would advise on a law thesis titled The Significance of Borders thus seems fitting—it might well have been the title of a book on his architectural principles.

The argument that Baudet developed under Scruton’s supervision holds “that representative government and the rule of law require nation states.”¹² Its purpose is “to reconsider the significance of borders.” Scruton’s influence emerges in particular when it comes to the agency given to architectural policy in the development of nationalist identity formation: “Whether in the form of a language, or through the upkeep of architectural heritage, rarely have states remained indifferent to the way or ways of life of which they are the ultimate herdsmen.”¹³ Furthermore (and in a remarkable twist that seems to defy his argument), modern architecture is given a pacifying role in postwar Europe, though not the one that postwar modernists, and those extolling the possibilities of European integration, had called for. It is an argument that goes something like this: Because the modernist architecture that defined postwar European reconstruction is so ugly, people would never make the mistake of bombing out their cities again.¹⁴

Who needs the European Union when modernism safeguards our peace?

The argument is ridiculous, of course, and only enabled by a reduction of policy to appearance—a reduction that becomes politically instrumental in breaking down existing institutions, which is precisely the agenda of parties such as Baudet’s.¹⁵ As such, it fits well within a global populist pattern, described by Reinhold Martin in the American context, through the creation of theatrical props intended to “sustain the nationalist bond as a form of aesthetic experience.”¹⁶ But if the postwar European welfare state and its corresponding architectures did play a pacifying role in preventing a return of both right- and leftwing extremism at all, then it was through policies of security and reduced inequality, shaped by the perceived threat of a communist alternative and assisted by early models of European integration—not because of the way they look. Baudet’s reduction of modernity’s many complexities to a singular aesthetic, following Scruton, creates a binary.¹⁷ There is modern architecture and there is classical architecture. “Fuck de context? Fuck de Koolhaas!”¹⁸

In his victory speech of March 20, Baudet stands in front of a semicircular background screen featuring the party’s symbol and name. On the Dutch multi-party spectrum, one can find a full range of political brands, from the Labor Party’s rose-and-fist logo to the Freedom Party’s seagull and the Socialist Party’s red tomato.¹⁹ Other parties go for solely typographic solutions, generally of the sans-serif type.²⁰ In the case of the Forum, its logo is a building. It is an image of a temple—presumably—made up of an abstracted pediment, entablature, four columns, and three steps.

This temple could be Greek, considering that the Forum’s political message is composed of a perfect rhetorical storm of the threats to a centuries-old Western democratic civilization. Or it could be Roman—the party, after all, is not “Agora for Democracy.” Perhaps it is neoclassical, given Baudet’s oft-stated admiration for the nineteenth century, including its nation-state and colonial emphases.²¹ It could, of course, also be simply an abstraction of a historical postmodern building in the 1980s Leon Krier/Prince Charles sense—team Scruton. In any case the temple, in its abstraction, collapses all classical architecture into an image.

Standing in front of these mini temples, Baudet appropriates Hegel (he opens by saying “Minerva’s Owl spreads its wings”), echoes Jean-Marie Le Pen’s ideas on racial purity (he uses the term “boreal world” to describe Northern Europe), and asserts the Spenglerian decline of the West as the contemporary human condition.²² In all his rhetoric of nostalgia and nationalist homecoming, a clear solution for the “problem” posed by “architecture”—let alone a definition of the term—is never given.²³ Unlike such “problems” as the “horrible” European Union (solution: get out); cultural insecurity (solution: nationalistic pride); immigration (solution: close borders); and the “party-cartel” (solution: direct democracy), Baudet’s speech offers no direct solution to the perceived problem of modernism. Baudet, like Scruton, is simply “against” modern aesthetics, and one is left with the assumed solution of a return to “tradition.”²⁴

But perhaps there is another point to be made. It might very well be that the return of classical architectural aesthetics to the nationalist political stage can be explained by the emergence of another enemy—one that is, in fact, real and not imaginary, and one that Baudet addresses in the next part of the speech. Added to “all the left-wing indoctrination in education, all the ugly architecture, and the increase in power of the European Union” is “all the climatic heresy.”²⁵

The Forum’s campaign was largely run on the grounds of countering the so-called energy-transition—the Dutch response to fighting climate change legally defined by the “climate-law.”²⁶ With the dust from the election now settled a bit, it appears to be more and more the case that what pulled voters to the Forum, less than an anti-European or anti-immigrant rhetoric, was the financial cost to society associated with the energy transition and with the need for the transition in the first place.²⁷

This transition is remarkably architectural—although not in the way Baudet has in mind. Solar panels, windmills, and heat pumps are suddenly used as rhetorical and imagistic devices to illustrate not only perceived economic damage but also, and more significantly, are instrumentalized to reveal the emergence of so-called Oikophobia—another term Baudet takes from Scruton.²⁸ Only self-hatred, Baudet argues in his speech, can explain the emergence of the energy-transition as a demigod in the “cultural and spiritual vacuum” enabled by the cultural and political establishment. Only self-hatred, or so it is suggested by extension, can explain the architecture of the new climatic regime.

What emerges out of Baudet’s speech is an us-versus-them that is framed through architecture. It is an image in which one perceived enemy (the “elite;” including architects) is being attacked for its attempt at tackling an actual enemy (climate change). In doing so, a nationalist agenda defined primarily by metaphors of imagined threats is positioned in opposition to a carbon-based agenda defined primarily by the reality of rising seas.²⁹ By equating modern, contemporary, and “green” architecture with those responsible for “mass-immigration,” while equating “traditional urbanism” with a “boreal” civilization that has “evolved for hundreds of thousands of years and survived ice-ages and mammoths,” xenophobia, the modern project’s social ambitions, and climate change become fully intertwined.

One could not find a better illustration of a contemporary condition, described most recently by Bruno Latour in Down to Earth, in which “migrations, explosions of inequality and New Climatic Regime…are one and the same threat.”³⁰ To be sure, Latour’s calls for a new terrestrial locality, despite its intentions, would need to be carefully scrutinized relative to the emergence of nationalist politics. But his proposition to consolidate these threats opens up the space for architects to reclaim a political relevance that could counter the Forum’s rhetorical enemies—precisely by accepting these complexities as an intertwined reality. That is why such remarks on architecture (whether on Rotterdam’s modernisms, the Grenfell Tower, or windmills) need to be unpacked within a global political and environmental context, even though it is easy—and tempting—to dismiss these as mere hyperbole, desperate postmodern cries for attention in a tiny country that is among the richest and “happiest” in the world.³¹ But to paraphrase Latour: Baudet’s “significant” borders will have little effect on rising seas.