BRAVE OLD WORLD: ON RUINING PARIS. At Ricochet, Claire Berlinski asks a few questions:

1. From the Gallo-Roman era to the recent past, almost everything Parisians built was beautiful, in many cases more beautiful than anything else in the world; and at least, not aggressively ugly.

2. After the Second World War, Parisians lost this ability — entirely. What has been built since then is at best tolerable, and at worst, among the ugliest architecture in the world.

3. Why?

Because socialist architect professors self-lobotomized and banished the knowledge, styles and techniques of the past long before the rest of the academie. Modern architecture began before WWI, reached fruition in the 1920s, took a timeout for the Depression and WWII and in the late ‘40s resumed pretty much where it left off before the war. In America, Mies van der Rohe’s influential 1950s buildings such as 860 Lake Shore Drive and the Seagram Building were based on aesthetic concepts he has previously worked out for such commercial structures as Berlin’s Adams Department Store that he never got to build in the 1920s. In France, if anything, aesthetically, Corbusier went backwards; his aptly-named brutalist concrete apartment towers such as the Unité d’habitation in Marseille being nowhere near as sleek and attractive as his 1920s white stucco homes for his first, wealthy avant-garde patrons. And in both nations, budding architects took their cues from these heavily-publicized influences, whether or not they actually learned them firsthand.

France’s buildings look the way they do because after the war, France’s architects couldn’t think — or draw — in any other style.

On the other hand though, something tells me we’ll look back at postwar France as its good old days, both aesthetically and otherwise.