A more hopeful graphic, on the other hand, shows how even a product of the bleakest modernism can be reconfigured into an attractive form, if principles of beauty are applied, just as even a starving, skeletal runway waif can blossom into a goddess if she indulges herself freely and gains generous amounts of weight, thus accruing femininity-developing figure fullness.
Now, we've all been assaulted by the sight of ugly, soulless, modernist buildings. Indeed, it seems hard to step out of one's door and avoid seeing one of these brutalist horrors.
However, a horrific recent development in architecture that may be even worse than the construction of new modernist monstrosities, and that is the phenomenon of parasitism.
The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, once a regal, 19th-century, Historicist marvel, now blighted by the addition of a twisted mass of steel girders sheathed in aluminum.
An architectural "parasite," then, is an incongruously ugly, modern appendage that has been affixed to a formerly beautiful, traditional building, an addition that looks like a nightmarish tumour on formerly healthy living tissue.
Perhaps the world's most offensive example of an architectural parasite blights the following building, the only museum in Dresden that was not destroyed by the Allied terror-bombing campaign of 1945. The very fact that this one museum did survive the war obviously made it a target of particular resentment to the modernists, so the architect who was put in charge of the building's "restoration" in the 2000s drove a hateful shard of iron and metal into the museum's heart, as if he were a murderer trying to slaughter the past, to kill the beauty ideal itself, to rape the very soul of the German nation.
Nowhere in the world is there a nation more vulnerable to the aesthetics of guilt (owing to the propaganda that has been levelled against it over the past 70 years) than Germany, so little wonder that the country is especially blighted by architectural parasites. The elegant Neoclassical façade of the famous Congress Hall in Nürnberg, for example, now suffers from what looks like a pair of gigantic metal shears tearing into its side, while a misshapen metal box perches crazily on top.
The creators of these architectural parasites go out of their way to defame the past by every means available to their warped minds, whether through violent ugliness, as shown above, or through idiotic lunacy, as seen in this picture of a pathetic addition to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, which resembles an oversized kitchen sink.
Most visibly parasitic of all is this nightmarish extension to the Port House in Antwerp. How fitting that the modernist addition should look like a gigantic cockroach, like a Lovecraftian terror out of a bad sci-fi film, about to prey on this vulnerable historic building beneath it. In just such a way has the legacy of Western culture been violated and ravaged by the resentful modernists, who hate its beauty with a zealotry bordering on fanaticism.
