American Fox News host Tucker Carlson has some interesting views on Hungarian architecture, claiming it is a reminder of ‘how bad it can get’ and that Americans don’t understand ‘how bad it can get’.
Visiting the country to interview Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the political commentator gave a public address that praised the European country’s architecture, saying that it ‘uplifts’.
"I wish I lived in a city full of bullet holes in the building because every morning you look at them and you think to yourself, it could be really bad because it's been really bad. There's a lot at stake," he says.
The American says the damaged buildings serve as a reminder to make wise, sober, long term decisions or else you could wind up with more bullet holes."
Carlson was quick to point out the differences between the built environment within Hungary to the United States, describing the atypical glass and steel buildings within his home country as ‘dehumanising’.
"Dehumanizing is the act of convincing people that they don't matter, that they are less significant than the larger whole, that they are not distinct souls, that they are not unique, that they are not created by God, that they are merely putty in the hands of some larger force that they must obey," he says.
Carlson cites the work of Modernist pioneer Mies van der Rohe, making claims that the work of the architect is oppressive.
"Mies van der Rohe architecture was designed to send that message not to uplift, but to oppress. And it is very noticeable and this is never noted in the United States, which unfortunately over time has had its aesthetic sense dulled. We've been told it's not important.”
Gesturing to the bullet holes lodged in the Gothic buildings as ‘small arms scars’, Carlson says there are few buildings in the United States that share a common visual that serve as "a very useful reminder" to the horrors of war not fully appreciated by younger generations.
"There's not a passion to study what happened before in a place that you're building anew. Right? Right. So we don't have a sense of that. So I love your bullet holes. Let me just say, I'm probably the only visitor to your nation has complimented your small arms and artillery scars.
“The buildings are pretty. The architecture uplifts.”
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