Exploding the Myths of Modern Architecture
By Malcolm Millais
Frances Lincoln £18.99, 304 pages
FT Bookshop price: £15.19

Nearly 30 years ago, Tom Wolfe published From Bauhaus to Our House. It told the story of how America had been awed by the arrival of the architects of the Bauhaus who were fleeing Nazi Germany. The book was a brilliantly acerbic, witty diatribe against the tyranny of the modernist establishment. Malcolm Millais has tried to explore and update the same territory. The difference is that Tom Wolfe was one of the greatest writers and social critics of his generation; Malcolm Millais is an engineer.

His book is a bitter rant about contemporary architecture. Millais’ proposition is that a century of progress has led to inefficient, ugly, unpopular buildings that we have been duped into accepting by an elite conspiracy of incompetent, arrogant architects who believe they are artists.

Millais recounts tired tales of sub-standard housing, of iconic buildings with leaky roofs, of minimalist glazed offices that become greenhouses in summer and deep freezes in winter. And of course, he is right.

The history of modern architecture is certainly rich in failure. But what the author forgets is that architecture responds to a brief. The deep floor plates of corporate offices demanded more glazing than the small chambers of Victorian commercial buildings. Building technology and land value led buildings to grow taller and it became cheaper and easier to extrude them upwards in repetitive sections.

Our cities are an illustration of the hegemony and reach of contemporary corporate culture just as those of the medieval era were representations of the power of the church, the guilds and the nobility. However, there is nothing in Millais argument about society, about the client. Architects are presented here as gods who simply drop their iconic turds unassisted. This is an astonishingly naive view.

Millais is highly vocal on the architectural blockbuster that inevitably spirals over budget and siphons public money. Yet his main example, the Sydney Opera House, is surely one of the most popular buildings of the modern era. The author is also patronising to suggest that people instinctively dislike contemporary architecture. London’s Tate Modern and the Centre Pompidou in Paris are hugely popular because they have become new urban forums. Architects are responsible for only around 10 per cent of construction; most of the dire housing of the past two decades is the work of mass housebuilders. Is that the democratic alternative Millais desires?

Architecture is, like art, ultimately an expression of an age. We get what we demand and what we deserve. While it is true that you can hate contemporary art and avoid it in a way you cannot avoid buildings, it is also true that we in the privileged west now live surrounded by comfort and space unimaginable to the majority of city dwellers of a century ago and the majority of city dwellers elsewhere today. Negative and proposing no alternatives, this is a profoundly dispiriting book.

Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture critic