Hail Quinlan Terry

Since the early 20th century, Western society has been in the grip of a culture of repudiation — rejecting one by one the institutions, offices, traditions and achievements of the past, while having often little but sentimental emptiness with which to replace them. The most telling instance of this is modern architecture. For three millennia Western builders looked back to their predecessors, respecting the temple architecture of the ancients, refining its language, and adapting it to the European landscape in ways that are subtly varied, entirely memorable and above all humane. Then Le Corbusier burst on the scene. His plan was to demolish Paris north of the Seine and to put all the people into glass boxes. Instead of dismissing this charlatan as the dangerous madman that he clearly was, the world of architecture hailed him as a visionary, enthusiastically adopted the ‘new architecture’ that he advocated — though it was not an architecture at all, but a recipe for hanging sheets of glass and concrete on to crates of steel — and set about trying to persuade the world that it was no longer necessary to learn the things that architects once knew. Thus was born the modernist movement.

One by one the modernists took over the schools of architecture and extinguished in each of them the light of traditional knowledge: this was their ‘project’, more pernicious by far than the ‘project’ of Blair and Brown. Students of architecture were no longer to learn about the properties of natural materials, about the grammar of mouldings and ornaments, about the discipline of the orders or the nature of light and shade. They were not to be taught how to draw facades, columns or the fall of light on an architrave, still less how to draw the human figure. They were not to be taught how to fit buildings behind a facade — Corb didn’t ‘do’ facades — still less how to follow the line of a street or to slot a building gently among its neighbours or into the sky.