Living Machines

Product Description

Following up his best selling books Degenerate Moderns and Dionysos Rising, E. Michael Jones completes the trilogy as he reveals in this book how modern architecture arose out of the disordered moral lives of its creators. Beginning with the simultaneous collapse of both his marriage and the Austro-Hungarian empire, Walter Gropius formulated an architectural rhetoric that would speak to the needs of the newly emerging modern man.

As a sexually liberated social monad, modern man would have no need for home or family, no need to be rooted in a particular time or place. He was to live henceforth in the "international style." Soon that deeply materialistic, sterile architectural vision would conquer the world. From the suburbs of Moscow to the south side of Chicago, the new man would live in machines, "living machines", to use Gropius' words. Jones' book is an explanation of where that vision came from, where it led, and why it failed. Illustrated.

"Socrates said that the order of the city was the order of the soul writ large. Man's internal spiritual order, or disorder, is inevitably reflected in the political and cultural arrangement of his surroundings. Anyone who has stood dumbfounded before the ugliness of many modern buildings must have wondered what conception of humanity inspired these structures. Jones has the answers in the moral biographies of the seminal architectural revolutionaries of the 20th century.

In his dissection of the spirit of modernity, Jones has again proven to be a master pathologist." -Robert Reilly

"Modern architecture concretized the denial of man. Jones descibes the neurosis which made modern architectural theory more of a condition than a philosophy and more of a pathology than an art." -Fr. George Rutler