Arriving in Oslo, the Barcode District is unavoidable. It is so named because its blocks are laid out like dominos – each design a tawdry, throwaway joke. But the Norwegians have had enough. With a spate of such controversies, Oslo has become an epicentre for an architectural uprising against the uglification of cities. Its Nordic Symposium on Beauty in Architecture has become an annual meeting point for plotting the insurgency.

Unlike on this side of the North Sea, where traditional and classical architecture found a champion in the King, Scandinavia’s counterrevolution is led by ordinary citizens. Their grievance is not only the built aftermath of modernism (unwalkable cities, tower blocks, ahistorical architecture), but that the tenets of modernism have drastically undercut architectural standards and must be reversed.

This year’s symposium began with a memorial for the Northern Irish architectural historian James Stevens Curl, who died last November. Behind a tweedy exterior and cut-glass accent, he brought an Ian Paisley-esque wrath against modernism, regularly evangelising on the traditional architecture circuit. A prolific author, he was known for Making Dystopia, an architectural version of The Ninety-Five Theses, dismantling modernism’s founding doctrines.

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Most pernicious of these, as restated by classical architect Robert Adam, is the tautology that ‘buildings should be of our time’. That the present is not a continuation of history, but a break with it. But with modernist buildings and ideas now a century old, those who claim to be beyond history are themselves slipping into traditional pastiche – their favourite put-down. Yet scholarly debates over modernism’s original sin feel like the wrong battle. Factual accuracy means little in an architectural culture that has already been unmoored from history. Indeed in my own architectural education, I was prescribed more reading on black feminist theory than the birth of the Bauhaus.

There’s a fitting sense that beauty must also be defended on other grounds. At the symposium, this included brain science and the emerging........

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