I’m one of those who are convinced that the West is still living with the after effects of World War One. The end of the First World War did not bring about peace but instead created a world inhabited by damaged individuals whose experience in World War One shaped their personalities, their interests and their politics.

There’s a brilliant article that was written in 2017 in Common Edge magazine about architecture and architectural trends following World War One. The article talks of how some of the more brutalist and inhumane building designs had their origins in both the personalities and mental conditions of the designers of buildings but also the effects of the trauma of conflict.

The authors, Anne Sussmann and Katie Chen, start off by examining how some architects might be influenced by autistic spectrum disorders that in turn affect their choice of building designs. They do make a good point here about how traditional buildings that may have features that look like human faces might put off those designers with autistic spectrum disorders and may have been a factor in why they designed buildings that were so radical and jarring.

However what caught my eye is the section about the experiences that some architects had in their early lives during World War One. They make the point that even if they were not combatants, the effect of losing so many people from the countries that were fighting had an impact on the personalities, politics and design choices made by these architects.

I can see how this might happen. The First World War was so culturally, religiously and politically traumatic that one response to it would be to try to do anything that was different from the world that existed before and during the war.

Ms Sussmann and Ms Chen after speaking about the war’s influence on Le Corbusier said:

The impact of World War I turns out to be quite significant for other founding modern architects, too—for different personal reasons. Both Walter Gropius (1883-1969), who brought the modern curriculum to Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in the 1930s, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) who did the same for the Illinois Institute of Technology, likely suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), or brain damage from surviving years of military conscription in the German Army which lost more than two million men in the four-year conflict.

Today’s trauma specialists know “the body keeps the score,” as Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, the founder of the Trauma Center of Brookline MA and world-renown PTSD expert, is fond of saying. (He published a New York Times best-selling book of the same title in 2014.) Prolonged and repeated exposure to near-death experiences change the brain, actually shrinking it, fMRI research shows. Survivors lose the ability to interpret environmental stimuli in a normal or “neurotypical” way and, similarly to autism, the disorder can significantly compromise their ability to understand and empathize with others. PTSD sufferers tend to avoid eye contact, something the mentally healthy perennially seek for emotional regulation.

Gropius’s war experiences were particularly horrific; seriously wounded on the Western Front, he also survived a plane flight where the pilot had been shot dead. So, when he built his own home in a Boston suburb, (in Lincoln, MA, 1938) two decades later, and three thousand miles away from where he saw military action, he put the building on a remote hilltop far from the street. Its front façade and overall form suggest a concrete pill box or duck blind, complete with flat roof, hidden door and slit windows, the better to shoot from. His home office has a front window with a sill more than four feet off the floor—no one could possibly see him inside from outside and he could only see out when standing up (not unlike a WWI trench). The brain of a war veteran may forever mix past with present, struggling to find safety ever after; the terrorized subcortical parts of his brain, stuck at the Front, directing every move of the design.

The problem is this sort of design, informed by personal trauma, has not just been confined to the homes of architects. This sort of brutal, inhumane and fearful design of building one devoid of ornament and joy has been inflicted on millions. When we look at some of the more awful and badly designed buildings from the mid 20^th century to the present we are looking at buildings created by those who were in their turn influenced by those whose First World War trauma informed their design choices. In building styles at least it is therefore reasonable to say that even today, with the last World War One combatant long dead, that we are still living with the influences of those individuals whose war experiences between 1914 and 1918 profoundly afflicted them.