From Bauhaus to Backlash: The Return of Anti-Modernism
I’ve been happily surfing on a wave on social media about the growing anti-modernism movement and then I found myself wondering when and where the wave originated.
I’m pretty sure I noticed it first when I started following a Norwegian account on Instagram called Arkitektur Opprøret Norge (Architecture Rebellion Norway). Cheeky, in-your-face and backed with knowledge. @aonorge quickly spawned a movement with copycat accounts based in other cities and I’m a big fan of our local chapter here in Copenhagen called Copenhagen Ugly.
You get the vibe when looking at the screengrabs from AO Norge and CopenhagenUgly, above. Comparing the modernist buildings that are being built today with Soviet architecture. AO Norge is in Norwegian, but you’ll the point. Copenhagen Ugly posts in English.
Doing some research shows that this current backlash against modernist architecture started back in 2019–2020 in the Nordics, Germany, France and the UK with a flurry of Instagram accounts talking about it.
The pandemic seemed to accelerate it, which makes a whole lot of sense. People were locked down, working from home with lots of time to walk around their neighbourhoods and notice the details. I certainly did. I started looking up and seeing the architectural details on buildings on the street where I’ve lived for 15 years. People spent more time in their neighbourhoods and became hyper-attentive to their surroundings.
The anti-modernism wave, from what I can ascertain, is primarily boosted by young people using the power of social media. This is not a handful of grumpy heritage groups, this is a youthful international, aesthetic rebellion.
Backlash is Back
I wrote the “current backlash” because this rejection of modernist architecture and modernism is nothing new. Let’s travel back to the origins.
Modernism strutted onto the stage a century ago with the swagger of a new religion. The prophets declared history dead, ornament criminal, and cities destined to be machines. Out with cornices, columns, local quirks, and messy street life. In with concrete, glass, steel, and grids that could be copy-pasted into any urban setting.
The Bauhaus Movement (1919–1933) started it off. It preached a gospel that quickly gained a faithful following. People like Le Corbusier held the megaphone, and governments desperate for efficiency fell in line. Architects became priests of a new faith, convinced they were liberating humanity from the dust and clutter of the past.
The irony is that Bauhaus began as a progressive, even humanist project, but its stripped-down, rational look was quickly adopted by developers and governments because it was cheap, fast, and easy to replicate. It started all utopian, but it morphed into architectural fast food — with a drive-thru window.
The rise of the automobile had started around the same time as Bauhaus. Cars were the future and they went hand in hand with blank facades. The dumbing down of architecture had begun and Los Angeles was ground zero.
This is where things like the strip mall were invented. Billboards, too, rose high above buildings. Large, simple signs replaced ornamental details. Huge letters broadcasting what you could buy were plastered on facades: LIQUOR, CHICKEN, PARKING, etc. Gaudy sculptures were often enough to convey the message.
We know now that pedestrians and cyclists register 67 features on the urban landscape for every 30 m we travel through a city. We take it all in. In contrast, motorists flying down a road at 50 km/h can only register 6 or 7 features. That’s why architecture started featuring larger, lifeless facades with simple signage. This spread fast through the US in the 1920s and 1930s.
Seductively Modern
It looked revolutionary back then. In the post-war period, Europe’s cities were ravaged by war. Populations needed rehousing at scale, industry could churn out slabs faster than a mason could carve a keystone, and politicians needed visible proof of progress. Modernism delivered exactly what the moment seemed to demand: speed, hygiene, efficiency, neutrality. The white boxes, ribbon windows, and glass towers were less about beauty than about authority. You could walk through a bombed-out district in Rotterdam, Berlin, or Coventry and see the same promise: the past is gone, the future is rational.
Within a generation, however, the bright gospel of machines for living had dulled into the flat light of housing estates that nobody wanted to live in. The new world suddenly looked less like liberation and more like a three-dimensional spreadsheet.
That’s the wound. A century of being force-fed architectural fast food. Modernism was the first Happy Meal, wrapped in slick packaging and sold as progress. Brutalism was the all-you-can-eat concrete buffet. Postmodernism tried to be the ironic toy inside. And like anyone on a long junk-food diet, people are now starved for nourishment. They want cities with flavor, texture, and memory. The anti-modernist push is not sentimental nostalgia — it’s hunger.
The cracks showed early. By the 1960s, Jane Jacobs was already pointing out that cities were living organisms, not machines. Prince Charles famously called a proposed modernist extension to the National Gallery a “monstrous carbuncle” in the 1980s and, after a period of ridicule, ended up with the British public nodding along.
Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown played with irony, pasting stripes and oversized pediments onto buildings to prove that “less is a bore.” Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk pushed back against suburban sprawl in the 1990s by selling traditional town plans like Tupperware. And at the same time, heritage movements grew teeth. Tourists ignored modernist plazas but clogged medieval squares, proving with their feet which urban forms actually had appeal.
The rebellion stayed scattered until the twenty-first century, when all the excuses began to collapse. The idea that detail was unnecessary because you were driving past at fifty kilometres an hour made sense only in the golden age of the car. Once people started walking and cycling again, cornices and doorframes mattered.
The claim that efficiency was humane looked absurd in the light of mass alienation, crime, and loneliness in poorly designed estates. Glass towers went from symbols of modernity to climate liabilities, ovens that cannot survive without mechanical air conditioning. And the final knife came from social media: a plaster rosette or a brick arch photographs beautifully. A reflective curtain wall does not. Instagram, of all things, exposed how soulless the glass box really is.
So the anti-modernist wave crests now because the stories don’t hold up anymore. Nobody believes they’re being liberated when they step into another drywall condo with a floorplan designed for the developer’s spreadsheet. They feel the starvation in their gut. That’s why traditional details suddenly look like haute cuisine, even to generations raised on concrete.
Humans Prefer Traditional Architecture
The flavour of the rebellion shifts depending on where you are. It is strengthened by studies that show that people prefer traditional architecture over modernism. It gives us a better sense of well-being. Here are studies from Sweden and the UK and below is a film about a Norwegian study — you can read the article here. Add to that the running joke that the architects of soulless buildings more often than not live in buildings with traditional architecture.
Longing for Memory or Community
In Europe, modernism is remembered as trauma: postwar rebuilding that bulldozed medieval street grids, cheap housing that eroded community, concrete towers parked next to baroque streets. The backlash here is about continuity — reconnecting the line that was severed.
In the United States, modernism was less about trauma and more about empire. Skyscrapers as corporate muscle, freeways as manifest destiny, suburbs as the promise of freedom. The backlash there is about belonging. People want an idealized Main Street or small-town intimacy, even if it never really existed. That’s why neo-traditional suburbs and Disneyfied towns like Celebration, Florida have traction. Both continents are reacting to the same malnutrition, but one longs for memory, the other for community.
And then there’s Brutalism, the strangest cousin at the family reunion. Once reviled, now fetishized. The style that promised socialist utopia has been recast as aesthetic object. Young architects and cultural theorists, who never had to raise kids in damp corridors or drag groceries up broken elevators, now swoon over raw concrete as if it’s endangered wildlife. Brutalism photographs magnificently: shadow, geometry, drama. Instagram loves it. Museums love it. It looks edgy and intellectual.
But almost nobody is clamoring to build new Brutalism, because the lived reality of it was often miserable. The revival is cosplay, a way of showing subcultural credibility. And yet it shares the same roots as the traditional revival: exhaustion with glass-box banality. One group craves ornament, the other craves raw honesty. Both are screaming the same thing — anything but another soulless investor slab.
Nordic Design and Scanditecture
It’s tricky here in the Nordics. We have a design tradition and culture that embraces simplicity and minimalism so many people associate the new-modernist buildings that developers love slapping up with our desire for “Scanditecture”. Developers play us for fools (they always have) and love that cheap concrete slabs help them make more money. Nevermind that these buildings will hardly last a century, if that.
Most of the construction pipeline is still value-engineered banality, but the aesthetic gloss changes according to the demographic. Fast food with cultural packaging. You think you’re getting a home-cooked meal; you’re still being served the same reheated investor product. That’s why cities look the way they do. That’s why there is this growing rebellion. Developers understand hunger, but they don’t care about nourishment.
The deeper problem is that we keep treating architecture as ideology rather than lived environment. Modernism was never just an aesthetic — it was a philosophy of control, of obedience to the expert, of treating people as interchangeable units. Postmodernism tried to joke about it but had no real alternative. Neo-traditionalism tries to reconstruct a memory of community, but often ends up as theme-park nostalgia. Brutalism insists on material honesty, but ignores the social dishonesty of dumping people into badly maintained slabs. All of it misses the simple truth that cities are kitchens, not machines, not sculptures, not brands. People don’t live in manifestos. They live in streets, in courtyards, in stairwells, in the micro-details of daily life.
Fast Food Architecture with a Drive-Thru Window
And that brings us back to the fast food metaphor. For a century we’ve been fed convenience architecture. Cheap, repeatable, stripped of local flavour, pushed out at industrial scale and more often than not, serving the automobile above all.. It filled bellies, but it starved the senses. Now the body politic is in revolt.
Some are reaching back for grandma’s recipes — pitched roofs, brick facades, proportions that feel familiar. Others are hunting for raw, uncompromising flavours — concrete honesty, shadows, mass. Both are rejecting the Happy Meal. Both are demanding food with memory, food with texture, food that can actually sustain.
The anti-modernist movement comes from that hunger. It comes from lived disappointment, from the gap between the bright promises of the twentieth century and the dull reality of its architecture. It comes from the rediscovery that a pedestrian pace is far more powerful than speeding cars. It comes from a climate crisis that exposes how fragile glass boxes really are. It comes from the instinctive knowledge that beauty and meaning are not luxuries but survival tools.
The question is whether we learn the lesson or keep getting conned by new packaging. Because the developers aren’t going to stop. They’ll sell you nostalgia, they’ll sell you raw concrete, they’ll sell you another “contemporary” glass slab and call it visionary. The only way cities get better is if citizens insist on nourishment instead of calories.
Modernism tried to erase the past. Postmodernism tried to wink at it. Neo-traditionalism tries to reconstruct it. Brutalism tries to confront it. None of them alone can deliver the city we need. The future belongs to whatever can finally shake off the junk-food logic of the last hundred years and start cooking with care again.
Because in the end, cities are kitchens. And kitchens, unlike manifestos, have one simple rule: if the food makes you sick, you stop eating there.
