When GrMa came back after doing his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, we were walking down Main Street. We saw a new restaurant called Habit. The interior was minimalist, very slick with ironic hipster touches like block printed outlines of wildlife on the walls. “This place is very TO,” GrMa said. “A bit WIHO,” I added. “But let’s try it.” Then we went in and had a great little tapas feast. I might still be going there if they hadn’t decided to raise all their prices.

Many years ago, I had a strange dream. I was in a restaurant that looked unlike anything I had ever seen. The rooms were all dome-shaped as though they had been made by the Barbapapas. Everything was white: the walls, the furniture, the people. I knew I was somewhere in Los Angeles, and that this was the most stylish place in the world. Everyone looked cool and everyone was drinking some sort of cocktail in a martini glass. But no one was smiling, no one was having fun. I realized that the atmosphere was too sterile for any flesh-and-blood human being. As I left, I turned around and saw that the restaurant was named “WIHO”.

Around the same time I had this dream, I was reading Wallpaper* magazine. Wallpaper* used to have a certain urbane style of writing that you couldn’t find anywhere else. (Sometime after it was sold to Time Warner, they gave up on dry wit and went for a more blatant kind of snobbishness.) It also triumphed modernist design and architecture. Stuff like this:

Clean lines were what was most important. No ornamentation. Just like Bauhaus before them, Wallpaper* believed in modernist design with a zealot’s fervour, but for completely different reasons. Bauhaus was reacting against what they thought was the excesses of previous architectural movements which used ornate decoration to express cultural sophistication (Art Nouveau) or national pride (19th century Colonial). Bauhaus thought by stripping architecture of everything but the essential it could democratize public space, making buildings that did not alienate anyone. Wallpaper* likes modernism (and, ok, sometimes post-modernism) for its technical audacity, and – weirdly – the difficulty of appreciating modernist buildings that often appear sparse and drab. By loving modernism, Wallpaper* distances itself from the masses, and cultivates its smug elitism.

Wallpaper* is one of the catalysts for the spread of WIHO, a global Los Angelefication. I’m not sure why Los Angeles was the first to pick up on this trend. Maybe because the city is all about trends and trendiness. It’s relatively young, and so instead of drawing on a past tradition, it likes to think of itself as a launching pad for the future. Modernism is certainly about the eradication of any references to the past. What I can’t understand is why modernism hasn’t become a part of the past. It’s been around too long to claim that its the wave of the future any longer. And who wants to go to a café that looks like this:

Wiho!

Incidentally, the correct way to perform ‘Wiho!’ is to draw out the vowels (wEEE-hOO) and wave your hand in front of your face as though you are trying to fan away an insidious stench.

Here are some more opportunities to practice:

So much white. Looks like Lego. And it’s completely out of tune with its surroundings. Wiho! *fan the stench*

A Bauhaus masterpiece. Fit only for borg. Wiho! *fan the stench*

It should be remembered that Bauhaus (and by extension most Modernist architecture) was focused on making buildings that would function as “machine for living in”. This is actually one of the buildings from the original Bauhaus institute. As you can see, it’s also a machine for ending life. Look – eveyone gets their own tiny suicide platform (well, what else can you do with it?). Wiho! *fan the stench*

Sadly, similar atrocities are all Vancouver. One architect described it as “a sterile row of glassy towers marching down the street.”

Vancouver’s recently departed co-director of planning Larry Beasley defends the suburban values of predictability, cleanliness and lack of architectural variety in the high-rise zones shaped by his “Living First” strategy, arguing that a key motor of Vancouver’s downtown success is making itself attractive to those who grew up in urban fringes.What better way to bring the suburbanites to the centre than with a mix of modernist blandness, and tacky post-modernist ersatz historical references! Can you say WIHO! *continue fanning stench for several decades*

As Alain de Botton said when he recently came through Vancouver: “It’s a condominium plague. It’s like a locust invasion.” For an idea of what non-Wiho architecture looks like, pick up his new book, The Architecture of Happiness.