Aldous Huxley and the “Brave New World” of Architectural Modernism

Using Aldous Huxley’s prolific body of architectural criticism, this chapter argues that Huxley evaluated political concepts—individualism, liberalism, uniformity—through analyzing the creations and rhetoric of the modern movement. While his brother Julian sponsored modernist animal housing at the Regent’s Park and Whipsnade Zoos as part of his efforts to imagine a more egalitarian Britain, Aldous reconfigured the structuring role of the household in the novel. His foundational dystopian narrative, Brave New World, merges fiction and criticism, as Huxley stages debates between literary advocates and a World Controller. What emerges is a politics of medium, whereby literature serves as a vehicle for liberalism. Against the uniformity and “over-organization” of architectural modernism, Huxley demonstrates the capaciousness and flexibility of the novel as a genre.