MORE ON SYDNEY PLANNING: THE IMPORTANCE OF EXPERIENCE

The SYDNEY PLANNING draft was edited for publication to become THE THIRD WAY OF PLANNING FOR SYDNEY. The text below includes the portions that have been removed from the original piece. They have to do with the experience of place, the reality of planning. Today outcomes have become irrelevant; only the process is important. No one cares about the immediate end result, or what might happen in a few year’s time. The play of words and their contrived alignment, their justification, with written planning texts is the only important issue. This is what needs to be changed in the Town Planning profession. There is no point in having any controls that have no interest in real-life outcomes. It is the lived sense of place that is critical for everyone. Anything else is merely a meaningless legal game.

For the initial text, see: http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2016/09/the-third-way-of-planning-for-sydney.html

 In summary, the issues were:

Scenario One. Business-as-usual. Piled-up egg-crate apartments loom over gloomy, windswept streets, everything is the same-same, on the hulking Barangaroo model, huge of footprint, cheap to build, dull to look at, nasty to be near. Such buildings feed no one' s pride.

Scenario Two. Sydney's central spine is green, thrilling, hyper-dense. Manifesting the fact of innovation, not just the rhetoric, it has become a beacon and uniting cause, proof that Sydney can be there up with Berlin and Barcelona.

Buildings are tall but most are slender at the top, being stepped back to reduce street-level wind and welcome the sun into the streets and parks, especially Prince Alfred Park. In the city around it, footpaths are shaded with trees and vines, every built surface bears edible greenery or a photovoltaic skin and the dominant sound - above the solar tram's whoosh, the autonomous cars' hum and the ding of cycle bells - is the herd-patter of countless walking feet.

Sydney's customary planning habits - where the careful have no power and the powerful have no care - can only deliver Scenario One. For Scenario Two we need the power and the smarts in the same hands; intelligent, public-spirited, holistic, all-encompassing planning. You choose.

Elizabeth Farrelly (see http://www.smh.com.au/comment/the-bizarre-planning-scenario-playing-out-in-sydney-20160818-gqvw6t.html )

There is no guarantee that things will be better. To get an inkling of what the Farrelly vision might be, consider Jean Nouvel's One Central Park development at Chippendale in Sydney. Nouvel's novel Miesan glass boxes have some additional 'green' wall panels and a solar reflector gismo. Ponder the future of more and many such developments, comprising taller, more slender towers, with tapered tops, more 'green' garden walls growing edible produce, and clad with a myriad of surface solar panels. Place these projects side by side to create a street frontage massed with trees and pedestrians bordering thoroughfares buzzing with the near-silence of solar trams and autonomous vehicles; add drones humming overhead and any other predicted civic gadgetry one might dream of or hope for. Then fill more streets with these buildings, trees, people and transport systems. Does Farrell envisage more again and again elsewhere? Why not? What might there be otherwise? Will this be better? Considering the necessities involved in matters solar with orientation and order, how might these demands accommodate the specific requirements of habitation? What might this city be? What might it become? It is easy to see how schematically vacant, how simplistic the vision, Option Two, is. Cities are richer, more complex, far more detailed and intricate than this loose diagram of a technological future that is pushed as being 'intelligent' and preferred.

The Blackhouse, Arnol, Lewis

It was in Lewis, at the Scottish Heritage blackhouse at Arnol that one unexpected, surprising statement made its impact. At the counter of the tourist office in the adjacent white house that seemed to have every possible quirky gadget, thingumabob, and self-consciously tortured idea on display, with cliches abounding in an endless variety of catchy displays comprising texts, images and forms, I purchased the small guide booklet by Alexander Fenton. The suave, neatly dressed, very rational 'engineered' young man managing what was the typical showy souvenir/ gift centre filled with kitsch, politely asked if I had liked the house. It was not a busy morning. I told him how I was impressed to experience the peat fire burning in the centre of the room as it had done for years, with no flue, both here and in most traditional cottages in remote Scotland and the northern islands; how l liked the sense of the place as having been lived in. He said, "Yes, those walls have seen life, births, and deaths. Only the roof has been refurbished; and a few pieces of locally donated furniture have been added. The old bible is still in the dresser drawer." Our cities need this embedded richness and respect, this subtle feeling of being, not the clever, sharp jibes and general, fashionable grabs to promote cliché visions as if they might only have utopian outcomes created by mythical figures that can be drooled over as artful performances by 'smarts.'

As I write, I look out onto the north-eastern parts of Sydney from the height of Freshwater. I see the various tower tops of the tall CBD buildings, and those of North Sydney, in the distance reaching high as if to peep over hilltops; but they are really just being assertively taller than others to declare this clever difference. Further east, nearby, the less tall structures of Manly grapple with the headlands for dominance. In the remainder of this broad, cinemascopic prospect, in the covering of the swellings of the hill-scape, and of the valleys between, one sees the giant smudges of shopping centres, the grids of other large-scale developments, and the construction cranes making those forms yet to be. Generally the hills are awash with a cluttered gathering of little boxes sitting under sloping roof planes across the gradients. At this scale, the vista appears to be a smattering of similar, simply stacked assemblages all trying to be individually separate, presenting, almost resenting, the conglomerate vista held together as the coherent mass of the cityscape by a fortunate fuzz of trees, the planners’ ‘ivy’ that buries all mistakes. Above this uncertain sprawl spreads broad arcs of high, bright sky. The saving grace of this loosely scattered, random array is topography and geography; its geology and flora - the place. Even without the harbour, the location has an authority and wonder.

The city of Sydney

Directly below my private lookout is a huge, weathered sandstone rock, bigger than house size, filling the void of a backyard that, in adjacent private spaces is blocked out with the deep pale blue-green of swimming pools, water that attracts a sleek grey heron. Each private feature shares a remaining enclosed space cluttered with a rotary clothes line on a small patch of green, and sometimes a small seat or an umbrella. Activity is rarely seen in these secret zones. Occasionally there is a bush; perhaps a tree. An old oak filters the view west, varying daily as the new leaves sprout a growing density of fresh green. The tallest tree of the region stands grandly to the north, a magnificently silhouetted eucalypt, the highest of the high, that, unlike the tall-built masses claiming similar prominence, declares its place in time with a supremely assured modesty. This tree is the playground for carking lorikeets; last spring it was home for a screeching cuckooshrike and shrill, nesting currawongs. To the east is the blue-on-blue horizon that reveals the brilliant morning sunlight; to the west the grandly glowing russet sunsets shape the dark hills at the end of the day. This is one quick glimpse of the city from a remarkable location, free of the cliché harbour, its bridge, and the opera house - the familiar city icons that grab one's attention, distract. Here, in the northeast, the settlement reads as pure happenstance in the presence of place - chance and necessity in operation rather than any plan: literally 'your choice' - an assemblage of private parts. The whole random pattern becomes explicit, confirmed in the lights of the evening that speckle the darkness of the slopes, a pretty sprawl of forgiving ad hoc patterns with all of the attractiveness of frozen fireworks without the noise and pollution.

Sun setting at Freshwater

The messy mass of the mall

Moon rising at Freshwater

As one moves around, across and through the city of Sydney, it is the vegetation and the geology that quietly whooshes and hums in the play of the brilliant sunlight. These are the elements that remain memorable, like those in the Freshwater cityscape, but on a different scale. These qualities are unforgettable, remarkable, in spite of the annoying ad hoc transport routes, the sundry squalls of surrounding strip developments, and the occasional moody, monster massings. The water that permeates between the treed sandstone outcrops anchors place with its enlivening chance encumbrances, sinuous intrusions and embracing, bracing distance: the harbour, the horizon, and its glow. These unique characteristics of Sydney offer suggestions, inspirations for the beginnings of plans for place and people. It is not Berlin or Barcelona and should never try to be; neither should it be the aimless, ad hoc, random shambles it seems struggling to become now; nor should it become a testing ground for the scope of new and fashionable technologies. It needs a third way that can address all of these matters in the context of accommodating the lives lived, these hopes, loves, struggles and stories, in the wonderful hilly, headland, harbour, coastal site that it is, to define a future for a special city, Sydney: its qualities.

What 'I' want gathered together in the green

But how might we have more than a plan with no prescribed outcome in any specific detail, one that only describes present limitations? Surely a plan demands a described future? One has to work and think laterally by creating definitions and guidelines that are open, able to identify and define qualities that can be recognised and achieved rather than specifying dimensions and shapes, functions and uses of an abstraction. We do not need plans that are loose documents that form the basis of negotiations with clever legal representatives for ever-different, more massive, intrepid outcomes, but ones that accommodate life subtly, allowing creativity, the new to thrive; not merely technological wizardry or a different scale or type of development, but renewed ambitions that have been the same for all generations. Yes the present appears hopelessly sad, truly a problem; but we don't need the second, opposite way. We need better. It is never a simple black-and-white choice: but it does need commitment.

Warringah Mall - the blur in the landscape

Sadly, with the 'techno' future, (and all futures?), one can see the 'smart' deals already - 'smarts' are not necessarily good; they are frequently dangerously cunning too: “We'll double the edible surface, include square kilometers of solar panels, accommodate hundreds of auto vehicles, provide drone pads, incorporate a solar tram station, and install a recharge facility for everyone if council will approve a scheme ten times the size that it currently suggest, all without any of the defined qualities - look what the city will gain!” It is never easy, but the city needs to start, start managing the random strategies and the trade-offs. The beginnings need only be tiny; then again, and again. Soon the small parts might coalesce into something a little larger that might make outcomes intelligible for more, enthusing others to do likewise on ever-larger scales, so that in time these too might touch, to give the city a unique, rich identity and diversity - a place to be lived in and loved, not a place shaped only for and by 'smarts' with smart forms and ever-smarter technologies to attract smart tourism dollars. People will travel to experience such a different, ‘ordinary’ place, to live in it and experience it, for they are very rare in today's world; but, one hopes, they are still possible with will and dedication.

What might it be without the trees?

Dare one suggest that there is there an easy, "She'll be right!" Aussie fourth way? Should one cynically just plant more trees, vines, edible or not, and layer all available surfaces with solar panels to shroud the cluttered shambles, to make the cliche 'green' city greener, 'livable,' and continue to allow anything to happen under the negligent spin of ‘progress’ - ‘going forward’? Why worry? Your choice? No, it is our choice. It is what is happening now.

'Planned' Sydney without the distractions of the icons

HOW ARCHITECTURE SHAPES AND MOULDS

Gurness Broch

One of the most informative lectures on architecture ever attended was one given many years ago by an historian: a lecture on Japanese architecture; in particular, the Japanese house. One of the best books ever read on the social and personal impacts of architecture and planning, place, was written by a social historian: the study was based on the experiences of those who had been involuntarily moved from, or had lost their homes - (reviewed by the Australian Archaeological Association, not any architectural association#). In a similar fashion, one of best technical presentations on materials in architecture was given by the chief industrial chemist of a large manufacturing company: complex matters were explained simply, thoroughly and comprehensively, without apology or compromise. The depth, clarity and understanding of all of these unpretentious presentations/studies were illuminating; unforgettable. It made most architectural lectures/papers look like light, hagiographical entertainment - pure indulgences.

Architecture not only reaches out into other realms of knowledge to try to make sense of itself, to explain, theorize and to rationalise issues, but other researchers, not architects, also frequently delve into matters architectural, and do it very well too. The two paragraphs below were found in a book on the brochs of Scotland written by an archaeologist. As with prior experiences of others’ views on things architectural seen from another context, the perceptions expressed here by Ian Armit, Professor at Archaeology at the University of Bradford, are ones rarely discovered or expressed so precisely, intimately or caringly, so comprehensively, in any architectural text.

Instead of grabbing clever references from other fields of study for its own indulgence; and rather than constantly looking in on itself and admiring and praising its ‘amazing’ output, the architectural profession should remain open to the views, opinions and understandings of others in fields of study outside of architecture, who frequently see things more objectively and express these views more simply, concisely, more expressively than architects do themselves, free of any fashionable jargon. There is much to learn and comprehend – if only we are prepared to listen:

Ian Armit Towers in the North The Brochs of Scotland The History Press. Gloucestershire 2003

p. 105-106 (on the broch village at Gurness in mainland Orkney):

For the inhabitants, too, this would have been a remarkable place, revolutionary perhaps for people whose parents and grandparents most probably farmed independently from scattered farmsteads in the surrounding countryside. This was a closed community. You either lived within the walls or you did not. There was no middle ground. It was a place where people's movements and actions could be watched and controlled, and where social norms would be hard to break. Only one path led in and out; the houses shared common walls, and were often simply subdivisions within a larger building. Entering or leaving the village would have taken on a processional quality, passing the doors of neighbours, squeezing past others on their way home or out into the fields. This was not a place to keep secrets. The comings and goings of each inhabitant and family group would have been obvious to all. It was a sheltered, covered, protected environment, but one where common values, communal lifestyles and co-operative ventures would have been hard to challenge.

Architecture is not simply a passive reflection of social structure, but also serves to reinforce certain values and social principles. For example, although the broch village at Gurness may have been laid out to reflect the social dominance of a single family within a wider kinship group, once built, it would have formed a remarkably potent symbol of social authority in its own right. For subsequent generations, growing up within the maze of passages and interconnected houses around the broch tower, their daily routines and their perception of the natural order of society would have been shaped and constrained by the architecture itself. The separateness, difference and dominance of the broch tower within the tight-knit cluster of otherwise standardized buildings, would have reinforced the social dominance of those within. The seclusion of the village itself, and island within its deep ditch and broad rampart, would have set the village community apart from outsiders. Once built, the broch village did not simply reflect the social life and world view of its inhabitants; it silently but surely moulded and refined them.

The question for us to ponder today is not only why architects are not interested in such understandings, but also: how is our architecture shaping and moulding us?

P.S.

For more on brochs, Mousa Broch, see: http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/mousa-broch.html

#

Peter Read Returning to Nothing: the meaning of lost places  Melbourne  Cambridge University Press 1996

for a review see: https://www.australianarchaeologicalassociation.com.au/journal/review-of-returning-to-nothing-the-meaning-of-lost-places-by-peter-read/

MODERN MYTHS: IS MODERN ARCHITECTURE A LIE?

Malcolm Millais

The stimulus for this piece came from the book Exploding the Myths of Modern Architecture by Malcolm Millais, published by Francis Lincoln Limited, London, 2009. It is now September 2016: the book has finally found its way to the remainder store ‘@ $7:00 for all books.’ Copies of the Millais publication are stacked on the tables along with all of the other glossy titles, fact, fiction, and random writings that had hoped for a better outcome. It seems that this book, in this sorry context, has not been a best seller. Yet the cover still declares its determination. There is little to wonder or be puzzled about with this situation because the text appears to be extremely negative, almost neurotic: seemingly obsessive, delusional, compulsive, full of details about failures and cheating in modern architecture. It is accompanied by numerous photographs and sketches that all carry what read as cynical and sarcastic commentaries, as if the raging bitterness of the author knows no limits; for example:

Home sweet home in enemy territory

The exciting toit jardin of béton brut

A house or a succession of metaphorical separations?

Architecture as a lot of hot air

There is something depressive about this book that hammers home an opinion on modernity in stark, deliberate, hopeless black and white. Any poetry is squashed, diminished, neglected: engineered out. ‘Life is my way or nothing!’ seems to be the attitude: ‘what I can make no sense of, no one will.’ One can be easily put off, because the text looks like an unrelenting diatribe against modern architecture. Still, it is worth reading, if only to test one’s commitment to architecture, its recent history and the present. The unanswered question is: what might one want if not what we have and have gone through? Can one really challenge history and leave a void, a black hole - nothingness?

The cover of this publication carries a strange, enigmatic title with an odd graphic format. Was it designed by an engineer? ‘EXPLODING’ is in bold red letters; ‘THE MYTHS OF’ letters are in black bold, but in a much smaller block typeface; ‘MODERN ARCHITECTURE’ is the same size as ‘EXPLODING’ but in bold blue. Why the differentiation? This title is located in the sky over the photograph of Minoru Yamasaki’s Pruitt-Igoe housing scheme being demolished. The author’s name is in bold white letters in the clouds of dust at the bottom of the cover, sized smaller than ‘THE MYTHS OF.’ Is this a false modesty? The raw awkwardness and determination of the book is obvious in the cover. One tries to read the intent: ‘EXPLODING ARCHITECTURE’? ‘EXPLODING MYTHS’? - or is it revealing ‘THE MYTHS’? - ‘MODERN MYTHS.’ It seems that just too much is being attempted too boldly; too assertively. One is left puzzled, uncertain. Surely this is the author’s chosen title, not that of the publisher. Publishers have a better knack of selecting titles that have a more persuasive hum with clever, even subtly friendly references or resonances. The bland approach to the cover is seen repeated throughout the publication that is totally unforgiving: nearly everyone is wrong; misguided - heroes are cheats, charlatans. Modernism is a myth, based on a lie. Can this be so? It is as though the author has a grudge against the modern world and is determined to force his view onto everyone through his factual logic. He never seems to pause to ask why everyone except him, apparently, has been allured into a world of lies and cheating; has remained blind to it. Is the rest of the world full of idiots; fools? How can this one person live in such a place as this era when he alone knows what is wrong? Is this why the cover of the book seems to scream out just too loud, too incoherently? Little wonder that the text reads like a somewhat demented mind raving and ranting, never asking if there might be a ground to hold sense, to reveal relevance somewhere in between. The book brims with what feels like hate; dislike; distaste.

Millais is an engineer who is said to have studied architecture and building technology before qualifying in his chosen profession. One might comment that there is no architectural critic worse than an architect who has moved on to other things. That Millais, the engineer, is still so close to architecture and architects only potentially makes this worse: it is too easy for all architects to be categorised as incompetent acolytes. How does he speak to an architect he is working with? Apparently he has worked on many projects, both great and small. One can already see that this man will never give in; that his view is strong and determined; fixed, and right! It would seem to be pointless to try to argue a case for modern architecture with him; to try to explain possibilities. No doubt he would give a smart, snide retort to dismiss any dispute, or so his demeanour suggests.

Millais standing on le Corbusier's grave: just nasty?

An illustration of the approach of the author to his subject?

The photograph shows Wednesday night’s speaker standing on the grave of founding modernist Le Corbusier. Is Malcolm Millais smiling? Was he about to kick the concrete tomb? He looks harmless enough. But his book “Exploding the Myths of Modern Architecture” takes no prisoners. It was probably a mistake to allow him anywhere near the tomb of the still-reigning hero of modern architecture and erstwhile destroyer of Paris.

https://classicistne.wordpress.com/tag/exploding-the-myths-of-modern-architecture/

As one reads the book, one is indeed challenged. The issues are clearly sourced and referenced as factual items; even the most apparently outrageous issues are sourced. The author is not making this up. What he is claiming has happened, so it appears. One would have to check the context and content of his extracts to really confirm this, but it can be assumed, perhaps, that most quotes are accurate and present a satisfactory replication of their intended sense and reality even as a brief quote. For example, the author illustrates how le Corbusier - oh, how much is this man hated! - apparently cheated with his silo photograph: it seems literally black and white. The pitched roofs have gone: (for another Corb ‘cheat’ see: http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/corbusier-renaissance-man.html ) Millais makes one thing very clear in the book: all roofs should be pitched. Modern architecture is simply stupid for even thinking otherwise: flat roofs leak! This is a publication with no compromise; little joy; no happiness - just whinging and complaint. The book never seems to pause to ask about the experience that initiated these movements and interests; that stimulated them. It seems to fail to realise that the twentieth century was a time of turmoil and social upheaval, not only with major wars, but also with technology. It was a time of fast and enormous disruption and change. It swept up thinkers, challenging them to respond to this situation – why not? That they may have made mistakes in this excess makes them no different to anyone else – except perhaps Millais himself. Does not architecture reflect its society? If society has been dysfunctional, why not its architecture?

Mies's tower

One can recall the events Millais mocks. That one discovered these texts and images, built or unbuilt, and was moved by them, inspired by them, is as much a fact as those Millais itemises; that Millais might like to argue the case against this does not negate their relevance. The Mies - he even sarcastically complains about the use of 'Mies' and 'Corb' - model of the glass tower was indeed iconic: it is a word that Millais pillories, but the concept was, and indeed still is. Out of the florid, sentimental exuberance of the Victorian society, the modern era moved into a heady, hedonistic time and horrid wars that test futures: why not test architecture? Such times stimulate hope. That statements might be made by way of manifestos was a part of the times: there was enthusiasm for change, for dogma, for difference. It seems odd that one can now argue that this should never have happened: it did, and these proclamations were/are important. That they may not have been implemented to the letter does not make them false; that Millais dislikes them and can ‘prove’ their weaknesses, has more to do with him than history.

Millais raves on about the notion of ‘honesty’ in modern architecture and repeatedly points out that things were not ‘honest.’ Does this ambition for truth in expression become nothing if modelled only as style? Does Modernism fail if one can show that it is more style than new, grass-roots movement conforming in every way with its dreams? Maybe visions can and should inspire rather than become precise, engineered recipes. The work of Gropius is transformative; as is Corb’s work. That Meis set the example for glass towers in the much-praised Seagram Building is fact; that one may not like the future does not change much: it reviews the past and relocates it into a time that is NOW. This is life. We can all see things differently. Millais may rave on with every fact that he can dredge up, but it will never change what happened, or how things were felt in their lived origins. Millais’ interpretations revise the context, re-frame it with other understandings and the present, but this is what some research does. Good history, like good art, is assessed within its beginnings, in its own context, not that of another era. This fact, this approach, seeks to not change the original experience, that driving force, that excitement lived; where, e.g., young and old architects admire, love Ronchamp, and still do. Such contextual research seeks to discover this enthusiasm and sense, not merely complain about it with rational interpretations and analyses.

Unfortunately, the critic Millais seems to have no real alternative concept or proposal: this is a problem, because he is so keen to cast everything aside as irrelevant and worse. One cannot demolish a past and proclaim nothing as an alternative, not even create a fantasy past if the future is uncertain. Does he want everything ‘engineered’ - predictable? One can recall beautiful engineering - Brunel bridges, tunnels, railways, ships, e.g. - but Brunel was a poet, a special talent as well as an engineer. Millais seems to ignore poetry as something real and relevant, but goes closest to acknowledging it in his chapter on bridges. Now, one can be critical of bridges designed by architects - see: http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2011/05/on-bridges.html and http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2014/02/tensegrity-bridge.html - and other matters too, but there needs to be some directional sense to a critique, some ambition of outcome, even if it might be simple ‘honesty,’ a notion that Millais seems to struggle with.

Millais gets most enthusiastic about architectural education when he writes about Hannes Meyer taking over the Bauhaus: at last the mystics had gone! This is followed with the suggestion that engineers should teach architects, an idea that seems to support the understanding that only engineers are right: maybe mathematicians are OK? In the last chapter, Millais tells about a mathematician, Nikos Salingaros, who has proven the need for 'hierarchical complexity' - 'not only in architecture but in general' -  and has established a measure for it. He appears to offer support for this strategy and writes about another mathematician, Christopher Alexander, supporting his A Pattern Language. Millais does not mention Alexander’s The Nature of Order books, but one can assume he would find them agreeable to his cause too. These studies might be interesting and revealing, but one already knows is that self-conscious, rational measures and analysis do not provide a simple, self-conscious strategy for good design; there is no recipe: more is involved, in spite of the clarity of analytical facts. It is this subtle sense that Millais seems to mock with his raucous rigour; he ignores it; kills it, the thing that should be loved.

Fifteen principles of wholeness

In spite of being able to agree with nearly everything Millais elucidates, there remains a problem. There is substance in the search for modernism that we probably still need to pursue. That we might have failed to date does not make the efforts useless, inferior or false. The great desire to seek an expression for the new world did drive folk to write, hypothesise, experiment. Consider the times, the change from the weight of Victorian indulgence; the desire to move away from the preconceived past. One might admit that the ego was too eager, too keen to wipe the slate clean; but times have changed this. We do need a more subtle and enriching experience in our architecture. Unfortunately the computer is providing opportunities to explore abstractions as well as allowing us to build some monstrous forms: but rebuilding the past is no answer, even if Prince Charles might favour this approach. We do need to try to embody the richness of the spirit in the present. We can learn from the past; but because architecture is of its time, this means that we must change too if our architecture has any hope of becoming a revelation.

Now consider our era: our lying politicians; our negotiating town planners; our hyped promotional material; our innate arrogance; our selfie culture that sees everyone as an individual and genius. There is much that is driving matters on and on, leaving little time for reflection. Just when things might begin again to know and express more about a different context and life is unknown. If we refuse to change, things may just keep on the same trajectory as that defined by Millais. Sadly, his engineering approach will not fix things up, even though it is asked to hold anything and everything up, as Millais notes.

Millais quoted some old modernist writings, but there are many more that could have been included, ones that would not have helped his argument. We need to try to embody our past into our future, as science does. The process of conjecture and refutation is successful in science, so why not in architecture: then we could accommodate the Millais position along with everything that is good in modernism and all past eras, bringing these creatively into a new and grander future that builds for the human spirit and its happy accommodation. Trying to do this for a fragmented, bickering society that holds few shared beliefs will be difficult, for buildings are shaped and decorated by these matters of faith. They become symbols resonating with understandings beyond rational engineering, even though it is this analysis that supports them. The two aspects of architecture need to work together rather than fight as fragments, figments. Each needs to respect the other. It is this blatant lack of respect, its belligerence, that makes the Millais book hard reading. Maybe this is why it reached the remainder shelves?

 On respect, see: http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2016/09/aberdeens-wall-place-between.html