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Letters

Wednesday, 21st November 2007

Readers respond to recent Spectator articles

Simon Thurley asks ‘will we get anything better than we did in the 1960s and ’70s?’ and, ‘Will old and new be blended successfully to make beautiful places?’ It isn’t really a question of style or of consciously making a beautiful place. A Modernist building from its conception to its demise and beyond is an environmental disaster. Even before it leaves the drawing-board an inordinate amount of fossil fuel is consumed in the manufacture of its materials: steel, concrete, glass slabs and plastic. During its short life of 40 years or so it consumes further excessive quantities of energy in order to function — air-conditioning, lifts etc., and finally after its demise it cannot be recycled, so more landfill sites are needed for its burial. The whole process is then repeated to last another 40 years.

No, we will not get anything better until we admit that modern materials and methods of construction — though impressive like cars or fridges of the latest design — are not suitable for constructing buildings which last, which don’t use up the resources of the earth and which are not part of the throwaway mentality of our age.

There was a time before the discovery of coal, oil and gas when there was only one way to build well. Buildings had solid brick and stone walls and timber pitched roofs covered in slate or tile. They made up the entire fabric of Rome, Paris, 18th-century London, Edinburgh, Oxford and Cambridge, to name but a few. They remain as silent witnesses today.

Is it too late to call architects and builders to learn from the way these cities were constructed and have the humility to do likewise?

Quinlan Terry

Colchester

Powell was no racist
Sir: Randhir Singh Bains (Letters, 17 November) is being disingenuous when he argues that Enoch Powell was, indeed, a racist because the main thrust of his concern was against ‘coloured, not white, immigration’.

But Powell was concerned about culture — not race or colour ‘per se’. Powell was warning the indigenous British population about the dangers of uncontrolled large-scale immigration from countries whose religion and culture were wholly alien to that of the host nation, particularly where they chose to settle in large numbers in close proximity to each other.

He feared the consequences of allowing them to replace the host’s culture with their own and establish ghetto monocultures, created parallel to, but separate from, that of their host country. He believed (rightly as events have proved) that such immigrant cultures were, as they remain today, incapable of being integrated into mainstream Britain.

No one can deny that this has happened, and on a scale vaster than even Powell could have imagined. The fact that such immigrants were of a different colour was simply not an issue to him — but he did believe that he had a duty as a politician to warn the British people of the dangers to their society should their government continue to permit such immigration to continue.

Richard Longfield

Basingstoke, Hants

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Dan Brown

November 25th, 2007 9:23pm

Perhaps this lack of integrity in modern building design and construction is due partly to the tragic manner in which our commercial and residential property is now largely regarded as a commodity.

Vast expanses of urban sprawl and suburban development are now covered in estates of houses and "executive" apartments, built flimsily in the pastiche or some pseudo-modern blandness. Little consideration is given to infrastructure, which often consists of a chain supermarket and smaller services; very often these developments are built in complete isolation, connected to town or city only by motorway junction or bypass.

Our capacity to exploit buildings for our financial gain is leaving us with cultural and architectural bankruptcy. Surely it is time to leave this obsession, emerge from making home improvements and calculating the percentage profit that has been made over the past 10 years, and actually create new buildings and cities that matter- buildings that excite and endure, external spaces that stimulate and bring us together. Inspiration is not so distant - visit Barcelona, Rome, Berlin.