More Meades.. on housing design

More Jonathan Meades from his BBC 4 show Off Kilter on Scottish architecture. His words are fitting for the whole of the UK:

There is of course a bien-pensant constituency whose stupid knee-jerk reaction to modernism of the 60s and 70s is it can’t be any good so why not blow it up… and why not get a child dying from cancer to push the button as a final treat.

Modernism was expansive. It tried to create the unimagined the unprecedented, what had not been. It wanted to make a novel future. It was essentially optimistic. Why should the present fit in with the past? We may no do better but we can do different. That optimism is long gone.

Neo-venacular, the preferred idiom of Scottish builder for a tiresomely long time now, is the very enemy of optimism. It is a costed expression of sentimental restrictive bogus localism. The message of unambitious, risk free, banal, meek sub-architecture is one of suppression and curtailment. “You’re going to live in house like you grandparents house you’re going to be grateful for it”.

… But it is or should be architecure’s responsibility to go beyond that and to provide some sort of sustenance for the mind and spirit. Building like these (grey housing)  and the joyless cumulative environments that they create encourage nothing but a mental fast. It is not simply that there is an overwhelming absence of delight, it’s that that absence of delight seems willed.

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