Veritas et Venustas

UPDATE: What's Wrong With This Picture?

I just came across this perspective of the streetscape at the base of the Portzamparc tower. It's worse than I imagined. National retailers and mall operators have proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that when faced with more than 30 feet of a view like this, pedestrians will turn around and walk the other way.

In this case, there will be 200 feet of this (a New York City block). This is not a matter of style, Modernism, or Traditionalism. It is a matter of humanism and urbanism. This is an anti-urban design.

3 days

Click here

From the Post:

Six weeks ago it was hard to look at. Now it can't be ignored. That's how far Steve Karsay has come.

"It's a 180-degree turn-around," the right-handed reliever said after a scoreless inning yesterday. "You come to camp with questions in the back of your mind. Will there be life on the ball? Can I compete at this level again?"

Karsay's first four outings left big doubts as to whether he could make it back after essentially missing the last two seasons due to shoulder surgery. However, his final four have put him in position to be a helpful part of Joe Torre's bullpen. A scout who has seen all of Karsay's outings said yesterday's was his best.

DR. RIVERA PROVIDES RX

March 31, 2005 -- SARASOTA - It originated with an innocuous trade and about the most mundane thing you will see on a baseball field, a game of catch.

It began with the Yankees, unable to watch Gabe White for another second, sending him to Cincinnati last June 18 for a warm body named Charlie Manning. But it was a seemingly banal trade within the trade that just may greatly impact the 2005 Yankees.

Because with White gone, Mariano Rivera had to acquire a new pre-game partner with whom to play catch, and it is important to know right here Rivera's thoughts on that subject: "Playing catch is not just playing catch. It's work.''

It started with Rivera becoming Tanyon Sturtze's catch partner just four days after Sturtze himself had been obtained by the Yankees. Rivera had seen enough of Sturtze in the division with Tampa and Toronto to divine live arm, no clue. Now simply playing catch, Rivera had his impressions reasserted.

It commenced soon after that first day of catch when Rivera surprised Sturtze by telling him just how much of a better arm he had than the greatest closer in baseball history. Having grabbed Sturtze's attention, Rivera went into full preacher mode, sermonizing on aggressiveness with that 92-95 mph fastball. Challenge hitters. Throw strike one, but throw it where you want.

And that is how the game of catch returns to this story. As opposed to hitters being able to swing, pitchers can throw the ball just so much, and the idea of wasting even one bullet was anathema to Rivera. Every day the strike-throwing machine uses his game of catch to hone his accuracy and release point, and he converted Sturtze to his ways. Every day Rivera would move his glove from body part to body part and make Sturtze hit the target.

"I can't even describe how great it has been for me," Sturtze said.

Of course coaches have been lecturing Sturtze for years to harness that arm. To be more focused. The landscape of baseball is full of big, hard-throwing guys who never got their act together (think Jeff Juden), and those that needed a U-Haul life before the light clicked on. Here at age 34 and with his eighth organization, Sturtze appears to have been enlightened.

Why? Why is it different to hear important messages from a player of accomplishment such as Rivera rather than a coach? Who knows? But it has mattered to Sturtze. Mike Mussina, for example, has altered Sturtze's mindset about throwing his fine splitter whenever ahead in the count. It is often better that the hitters know he just might throw it than fall into hittable patterns.

This all melds into what feels, to Sturtze, like perfect time, perfect place, perfect role. The everyday urgency of the Yankees swallows many whole. But Sturtze loves being a Yankee. He absorbed the lessons and the pressure, and rewarded the Yanks down the stretch and in the playoffs last year with some excellent work. It has carried over to such a degree this spring that one scout said, "he's rejuvenated his career. He's the most improved Yankee from last year. He's in better shape, he has better tempo on the mound and he is no longer just a raw-arm guy. Now he pitches.''

This has its importance within a Yankee set-up corps that has big names, big salaries and big questions. Are their lingering effects for Tom Gordon and Paul Quantrill in being overused during the regular season last year and being ALCS goats against the Red Sox? Does Mike Stanton have anything left? The same for the surgically altered Steve Karsay? Can Felix Rodriguez ever fully master his 97-mph stuff (Rivera is in his ear these days)?

Sturtze is a horse who can be used regularly for multiple innings. His background is soiled enough to suggest the Yankees should not fall in love with him, that this could be just another tease in a career of teases. Yet his arm and recent track record are good enough for the Yanks to think they have what they almost never get - a low-cost surprise.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

Answers below.

This refugee from a Houston office park is not a New York building. Its "shimmering, crystalline skin" has all the humanity of Henry Kissinger, and the weightless glass facade doesn't shape and hold the public realm like the masonry buildings around it. Their shadow and mass and masonry skin visually follow the rules of gravity and give gravitas, making the street wall very differently than a seamless crystal.

This is a city of streets and sidewalks, not parking lots. We need buildings that make the pedestrian feel good. The first rule is to shape the street. The second is to give the pedestrian interesting things to look at. This building might be interesting from a car speeding by on the interstate, but it's undoubtedly boring from the sidewalk.

via curbed

curbed has another "what's wrong with this picture" here

Quantity Is Quality, Part II

Here are two replies to Andrés Duany's post, below. The first is by David Brain, a Professor of Sociology at New College of Florida. The second is by Michael Mehaffy, an American architect who is the Director of Education at the Prince's Foundation, in London. Brought together on the internet by the pro-urb list, a discussion list for New Urbanists.

Michael Mehaffy quotes Prince Charles:

"...I do believe that we must ask ourselves: what is it that is really modern in [the new century]? Is it the metallic and crystalline geometries of a century ago -- or the organic complexity of today's biological sciences? Is it the standardization and mass-production methods of the early twentieth century -- or the customization and one-off production methods of the latest computer-based technology? Is it the linear notion of a single architect imposing his grand vision of a new utopian world -- or the complex notion of 'collective intelligence' embodied in centuries of tradition?" - HRH The Prince of Wales

I agree that it is important to raise the question-- what is really modern?-- but I want to warn against a swing of the pendulum in the direction of an exaggerated use of biological metaphors and analogies. With "biomimicry" now giving precise articulation to an older kind of fetishized naturalism, I see a danger of replacing naive machine age analogies of modernism with equally naive claims to do things the way Nature does. We don't have to stretch that far for the answer. We don't have to introduce elaborate efforts to "mimic" nature because actually culture already works that way already (modernist fantasies and aberrations notwithstanding).

That's what 'tradition' is. We don't have to pretend to be plants and animals, or think of ourselves in terms of some kind of misplaced biological or (even worse) evolutionary determinism. We just have to emphasize the cultural processes that are most likely to deliver the benefits of organic complexity (benefits like adaptability and resilience, for example).

continued

In this context, however, we need to emphasize that it should be organic complexity in connection with social learning. Complexity theory is big on self-organizing systems, but we aspire to be self-organizing in quite a different sense. In the midst of organic complexity, we aspire to being purposeful and intentional. We aspire to doing better by design. Although we all find it easy to ridicule the modernists' utopian vision, I don't think we can afford to ditch all of our utopian aspirations. Colin Rowe makes an interesting distinction between the politics of utopia and the poetics of utopia. A dangerously ambiguous boundary, in many ways, but a frontier that we nonetheless need to occupy.

It is a little dangerous to think of tradition as the embodiment of collective intelligence. It is, of course, but it is VERY important to stipulate that an ossified tradition can become exactly the opposite. A living tradition embodies collective intelligence because it is collective intelligence in practice, in the process of making a history and accommodating change, NOT because it is an form of accumluated wisdom that has to be treated as reified, authoritative and unquestionable. This is the common mistake that is made when one talks about tradition-- as Marx says, the fear of "the dead hand of the past resting on the brains of the living like a nightmare. That's not what tradition really is, but it is what tradition can become when it is taken up by institutionalized authority looking to use it in defense of its own prerogatives.

A few weeks ago, I was reading Howard Saalman's Medieval Cities, a little book that outlines the social, political, and economic logic governing the growth of medieval cities. Last week, I was engaged in a charrette in which I had the opportunity to participate as the design team worked through the design of a mountain village. Yesterday I had the occasion to go through Colin Rowe's Collage City with a group of students. So I've been thinking about what it is we really do when we strive to create urbanism by design, rather than just live with the 'urbanism' that we get stuck with by default.

I keep thinking about how much this has in common with the challenges of democracy in a more general sense. The legacy of modern technocratic rationality is that we've created a world where we are regulated by experts and officials. Our notion of democracy is reduced to allowing opportunities for "public input," an image of human culture that assumes that we are isolated individuals with fixed, pre-formed opinions and incapable of being educated or enlightened in the course of discussion. In other words, it assumes that we are literally without culture (remembering that the concept of 'culture' referred originally to the idea that humans are capable of being 'cultivated,' of acquiring virtues as a result of a process of nurturing those things that bring "sweetness and light" to human existence).

Organic complexity can be found in a simple conversation, although it tends to disappear to the extent that our conversations are either reduced to monologues or to stereotypical exchanges (both are particular dangers of a mass-mediated culture). We don't need to look to molecular biology for models of culture. All we need to do is consider the conditions that make for a really good conversation between consenting adults.

The real danger of the problem of large numbers is the temptation to think that we could manage them more efficiently without any conversation. We see this temptation repeated at every level of social organization-- from the voluntary association to the federal bureaucracy. It is a particularly powerful temptation for professionalized experts, of course, since they always know better than the rest of us, and their mission is always a matter of imposing a discipline that the rest of us can't completely understand. Designers are no different from any other profession; all harbor secret (and often not so secret) desires to simply dictate what is to be done. It makes NO difference if they happen to mimic organic complexity in their designs if they miss the real lesson of organic complexity: it's as much a matter of how we get there as it is a matter of what it looks like. How we get there is connected to where we can go from there, and that's what it means to create urbanism. It's also what it means to be traditional. Traditions are not about the past. They are about the way we go about creating a future we want.

David Brain

Brain's post was in response to this message from Michael Mehaffy:

"This happens to coincide with Giedeon's modernist 'We have the problem of large numbers.'"

Andres, that's soooo 20th century, daddy-o!

Here is what Rem Koolhaas, no friend of tradition, said about the train wreck that this notion has become:

"Modernism's alchemistic promise - to transform quantity into quality through abstraction and repetition - has been a failure, a hoax: magic that didn't work."

He was talking about architecture, but of course it was embedded in a socio-technological system. He went on to say "Its ideas, aesthetics, strategies are finished. Together, all attempts to make a new beginning have only discredited the idea of a new beginning. A collective shame in the wake of this fiasco has left a massive crater in our understanding of modernity and modernization."

And so, not knowing yet what else to do, we are left with the desperate spectacle in our time of zombie modernism. The undead stagger on, oblivious to their surroundings.

But notice how life does it the other way: it takes quality, and from that generates mind-numbing quantity - adaptively, sustainably. Of course this biological insight, along with a whole host of related revelations on "Nature's complex ways", has begun a radical transformation of science, and is starting to transform industry and culture. It is starting to change everything...

Things are getting interesting, friends!

"One of the important issues my Foundation here is engaged with at present is that of persuading designers and planners to listen to what scientists have to say about Nature's way of handling large numbers. Nature offers clues as to how quantity and quality can go hand-in-hand; how a complex order can respect diversity; how we can again achieve the fine grain of scale that makes buildings and streetscapes such a delight; and, what's more, how one can be truly sustainable by being adaptive. It is time, I think, for a new approach, informed by such thinking."

"...I do believe that we must ask ourselves: what is it that is really modern in [the new century]? Is it the metallic and crystalline geometries of a century ago -- or the organic complexity of today's biological sciences? Is it the standardization and mass-production methods of the early twentieth century -- or the customization and one-off production methods of the latest computer-based technology? Is it the linear notion of a single architect imposing his grand vision of a new utopian world -- or the complex notion of 'collective intelligence' embodied in centuries of tradition?" - HRH The Prince of Wales

Cheers, m

Michael Mehaffy
Director of Education
The Prince's Foundation
19-22 Charlotte Road
London, UK EC2A 3SG

p.s. instead of "designing" mobile homes, I suggest we should be redefining what a mobile home IS. (And what Dryvit is too, for that matter.) Engage the production and cultural processes! Transform them! Get architecture out of its silo! (Professional specialism is the other vestige of standardisation/mass-production too...)  (AMD, I know I'm preaching to the choir in your case - but you see the point...)

“In America, Quantity Is Quality”

On the TradArch list, Andrés Duany wrote:

Aldo Rossi made this observation to me. I was the only one present. He had just presented a huge shopping-center-as-town-center and it had gone very well and he was exhilarated as I drove him to the airport. He may never have written it or repeated it, but I have often thought about it and found the insight to be pregnant. We DO admire the fastest, the biggest, the richest, the tallest, the most points. But that is not what is interesting. The issue is that anything that is important in this huge and fast growing country of ours has to also exist in quantity.

After Seaside was in place we had to decision what to do. Rather than create other such nice tailor made places we decided to figure out how to produce it in quantity. It informs our practice and how I allocate my time. We decided for The Model T rather than the Bugatti. The Model T changed the world, the Bugatti is in MOMA. To each his own.

This happens to coincide with Giedeon's modernist “We have the problem of large numbers.” The New Discourse is about large numbers. The TradArch is perhaps not so interested, although Christine Franck is, to great effect.

There is a beautiful new book by Elizabeth Dowling. It is called The New Classicism. It is shows incredibly perfect, incredibly expensive classical buildings built recently. I hope that those talented architects will apply their talents to multiplying what they learned. Otherwise they leave the field to those who are not as good. That would be a shame. That IS a shame, because that is the situation today. They should all be off designing mobile homes next.

Jim Kunstler: The Long Emergency

Jim Kunstler's new book The Long Emergency is excerpted in Rolling Stone:

A few weeks ago, the price of oil ratcheted above fifty-five dollars a barrel, which is about twenty dollars a barrel more than a year ago. The next day, the oil story was buried on page six of the New York Times business section. Apparently, the price of oil is not considered significant news, even when it goes up five bucks a barrel in the span of ten days. That same day, the stock market shot up more than a hundred points because, CNN said, government data showed no signs of inflation. Note to clueless nation: Call planet Earth.

Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychology, famously remarked that "people cannot stand too much reality." What you're about to read may challenge your assumptions about the kind of world we live in, and especially the kind of world into which events are propelling us. We are in for a rough ride through uncharted territory.

It has been very hard for Americans -- lost in dark raptures of nonstop infotainment, recreational shopping and compulsive motoring -- to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life in our technological society. Even after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, America is still sleepwalking into the future. I call this coming time the Long Emergency.

Most immediately we face the end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as the necessities of modern life -- not to mention all of its comforts and luxuries: central heating, air conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lights, inexpensive clothing, recorded music, movies, hip-replacement surgery, national defense -- you name it.

Read more here. Buy the book here.

Rem Koolhaas & Prince Charles: Separated At Birth?

“After the end of the Second World War there was a tremendous feeling of optimism about the future. Quite understandably, there was a rejection of past values that had seemingly contributed to such a sequence of world catastrophes, in favour of a compelling vision of a new order. It was a world where people would live in buildings on stilts with plenty of fresh air and parkland around them and, when the weekend came, would take off to the countryside in their beautiful automobiles, to enjoy a freedom of travel and choice of destination their predecessors might only have dreamt of.

“One cannot necessarily fault the vision of this machine-age, as I suppose it was a natural response to conditions at the time. What we can do now, however, with the benefit of hindsight, is take stock and assess the last 60 years of experimentation in the built environment.

“Modernism's alchemistic promise - to transform quantity into quality through abstraction and repetition – has been a failure, a hoax: magic that didn't work. Its ideas, aesthetics, strategies are finished. Together, all attempts to make a new beginning have only discredited the idea of a new beginning. A collective shame in the wake of this fiasco has left a massive crater in our understanding of modernity and modernization.”

The first and second paragraphs are from Prince Charles. The third is from Rem Koolhaas. For Prince Charles's most recent speech, click here. Other speeches are here.

A speech by Prince Charles at the Launch of the New Zealand Urban Design Protocol, Wellington, New Zealand, Tuesday 8th March 2005.

Ladies and gentleman, I am so pleased to be able to join the Minister of the Environment and this distinguished group here today to help launch the New Zealand Urban Design Protocol.

Urban design is vital to the health of our peoples and our planet. The trend toward urbanization is a global one, and with New Zealand being one of the world’s most urbanized nations, you have appropriately taken a leadership role in both environmental quality and urban design. For urbanism and Nature are truly two sides of the same coin.

Proper urban design understands the importance of Nature, and preserves the edge between city and country. The fact that New Zealand has joined up environment and urbanism in one government ministry is a good sign, and I can only commend you for it.

The diversity of the group gathered here today to sign your Urban Design protocol is remarkable. You have brought together all of the sectors involved in development, as well as all of the professions.

That diversity demonstrates that New Zealanders know what it will take to reform the unsustainable development patterns that have swept the globe in the past fifty years. For the built environment is too important to leave to any one profession. If I may say so must pursue urbanism and architecture as an interdisciplinary process, and above all we must put the human being at the centre of the design process. After all, that is only good manners or courtesy when you think about it “doing to others as you would have them do to you…”

In the more than twenty years since I wrote my book Vision of Britain, in which I called for a sea change in the way we make buildings, towns and cities – and places, as the Minister has so rightly stressed – I have been gratified many times over by the positive reactions of many people.

It seems to me that residents of our cities, towns and villages instinctively understand that we need to learn again how to make walk-able, livable, well-mannered – dare I say beautiful, places. They also want to live in mixed-use – not zoned – communities, where one doesn’t have to use two litres of petrol to get one litre of milk!

In my quest to address the challenge of making our cities and towns livable once again, and on a human scale, I have used three main strategies: teaching by example, articulating key principles of architecture and urbanism and supporting the development of tools and techniques in practice.

First, I sought to create an example of a mixed use, mixed income, pedestrian-orientated community that reflected local character and local tradition. In Poundbury, an urban extension to the town of Dorchester in the South of England, my main aim was simply to provide a place that might improve the quality of life of the people who would eventually live there; would enhance the landscape in a sympathetic way and not be imposed upon it insensitively and would reflect the local identity and vernacular characteristics of Dorset.

The obvious starting point was to analyze the successful places and buildings that people have enjoyed living in for centuries, and to draw out the lessons of why they were still so popular today – so popular that you may have noticed how many architects, planners and other professionals live in them! Then I wanted to know how these lessons could be developed to make them better suited to contemporary needs.

Now that over 1000 people live there, I rather hope Poundbury has proved the point that it is in fact possible to break the conventional mould of zoned development and create a mixed-use community. But it is only one example of the range of diversity that can be achieved.

Incidentally, the Guinness Housing Trust, which is providing the affordable housing that now comprises thirty percent of the dwellings, tells us that Poundbury is their most successful and trouble-free site. Why? Because of a far higher satisfaction level than anywhere else – and this is due to an integrated, mixed approach to housing and work places. The affordable housing at Poundbury is indistinguishable from that sold on the open market. Interestingly 15 years ago I held a diner party for volume house builders, in order to persuade them of the value of mixed-use developments. Although they said it was a nice idea, they said it would not work in the real world. So I thought I would see if I could demonstrate this myself.

Today, there is a worldwide groundswell of new interest in this kind of compact, mixed-use, walk-\able settlement as a means of addressing the complex challenges of the future. The demand to visit Poundbury and use it as a teaching laboratory is now so great that my Foundation For the Built Environment has had to station staff in the town. If you emphasis quality, although it may cost more initially, it produces greater value in the long term. Nowadays all too often we tend to think in a short term way – quick fixes which are not sustainable.

The second tool I have used to champion the reclaiming of the craft of town-building was to define it properly. In my book A Vision of Britain, I articulated ten principles for creating a sense of place, and I am gratified to see that they are reflected in the “Seven C’s” outlined in the New Zealand Protocol. These principles embody the timeless solutions to the intricate needs of human beings in the built environment and, above all, demonstrate the ultimate value of placing the pedestrian, and not the car, at the centre of the design process to create more livable, human communities. They are the principles which enable architecture – as the most public of art forms – to address the public realm in a well-mannered way and to enhance our humanity rather than to treat us as another piece of inanimate machinery or technology.

I would like to highlight a few of your principles, and illustrate their importance and continuing vitality.

Your first “C’ is context, which means that buildings, streets and public spaces must be viewed as part of a whole. Too often they are not and buildings, in particular, are seen as individual objects, and as appropriate places for the imposition of an architect’s individual ego.

Your second “C” is Character, which is intended to reflect the history, culture and built heritage of New Zealand and its unique communities. This is vitally important, for we have found that each region has its own building traditions, its own materials and its own adaptation to climate and setting.

Resisting the global trend toward standardization, and exploring ways to marry local craft traditions with production building techniques is a challenge that can and must be met if we hope to produce thriving communities again. I know that your own Maori cultural tradition is ancient and deeply rooted, and that building in New Zealand can make wide use of local materials.

There is much that can be drawn on in an “organic” way and which can provide inspiration for the creation of places of character and local identity. To me, it is a tragedy that wherever you go in the world today you are confronted by the same dreary homogenization of our surroundings. What will there be soon to tell us which country we are in? Why can’t we balance globalization with localization? It’s the same with food – after all, in so many ways we are what we eat and we are what we are surrounded by…

In A Vision of Britain, I emphasized the notion of permeability, which you have defined as “Connections”. The best way to ensure a vibrant, walkable community is to build an interconnected street network.

The concept of mixed use and mixed income is also important. For many years we built housing estates where everything was separated, and then wondered why modern life seemed so fragmented and alienating. Our towns and cities should provide a diverse mix of housing suited for all ages and incomes, and should offer the opportunity to walk, shop and learn within walking distance of one’s home.

I note that one of your design principles is Creativity, and I just want to sound a note of caution here. As important as creativity is in all aspects of life, I simply do not see why it should be used as an excuse to sacrifice literally thousands of years of continuity with tradition in the process. In this regard, the desperate obsession with being “modern” seems rather old-fashioned – after all Modernism is only a style. But why can’t we be obsessed with being, above all, “human?” That way, I believe, lies true modernity since the process of life itself involves a subtle balance between the past and the future. Most of us need roots and a sense of belonging in order to feel some degree of security and meaning. Our built environment best enshrines that psychological need in a physical form. And in a world dependent on technology, surely we need a contrast in our surroundings that reflects our innate humanity and not just a continuity of the DVD player or the lap-top computer?

There is plenty of scope, then, for the creative mind in applying the principles of traditional urbanism to contemporary human needs. Creativity is important, but it is not a trump card.

The third way that I have sought to work in the field of design is to ask my Foundation for the Built Environment to develop tools and techniques for putting people at the centre of the design process, and to teach them through practice.

We have resurrected techniques from the Anglo-American building tradition that we share, including the architectural pattern book, the charrettes and design-coding, and used them to teach the languages of architecture and urbanism all over again. I am pleased to be able to report that, although much remains to be done, we are making a difference: even the government has adopted many of these techniques as part of its Sustainable Communities Agenda!

We are now beginning to see new communities designed according to these timeless principles being planned and built, on brown field sites, as extensions to towns and in inner city locations as infill and regeneration. My Foundation has also developed a partnership with our National Health Service to ensure that design principles of beauty and harmony are incorporated into the healthcare environment. Research is now showing that sensitive and sympathetic design can have a positive impact on people’s health – particularly if the patient is placed more centrally in the design process than merely the technology.

The adoption of a national protocol for urbanism places New Zealand at the forefront of best practice globally. Implementing this protocol successfully will require strong collaboration from both the public and the private sectors, not to mention the need to create much more flexibility within the conventional approach to planning and road engineering in order to allow the implementation of the kinds of principles we have been discussing. At present, most of the current attitudes and regulations can only produce standard, rather soulless housing estates or suburbs. But the representation here today leads me to believe that New Zealand will meet these challenges.

If I may, I would also like to congratulate you on naming 2005 as the Year of the Built Environment, and on devoting so much national attention to these critical issues.

Urging a swift response to the bombing of the Houses of Parliament after the Second World War, Sir Winston Churchill said, “We shape our buildings and afterward they shape us.”

We are finding out through research that Churchill was quite right, and that traditional urbanism can promote human health, improve social cohesion and help to shape a more – I hardly dare use such an over-worked word! – sustainable future.

Instead of seeing every building as an opportunity to make an ever more imaginative iconic “statement”, I believe we must see each piece of the built environment as part of a living language, connected to a living tradition and leading to a local “dialect” that enhances a sense of belonging in a world that is rapidly in danger of “pasteurizing” the true meaning of our place in Nature and ending up with “genetically modified” surroundings that are never in harmony with our fundamental instincts. Rather, we must come to regard the characteristics of traditional architecture as not merely unfashionable political statements, to be thrown out with yesterday’s rubbish – but, rather, as organically adapting creations over the passage of time, helping us to generate and regenerate places that relate to our essential humanity and thus are truly contemporary.

After all, you only need to think for a moment of the places most of you want to live, or perhaps visit on your holidays in far-flung countries, to see a little of what I mean.