I much enjoyed reading Stuart Kirk’s column “Politicians and bosses need to prioritise beauty” (Opinion, FT Weekend, September 7).
On the subject of housing and beauty, as an architect I feel new developments are not just lacking in performance, spatial quality and energy efficiency but originality, contextual appropriateness, and also aesthetic merit and “soul”.
This is depressing. Many buildings constructed today will be lucky to last a few decades — mainly because of the poor quality and the fact no one will want to save them. There are many complex reasons for this — but a lot of it is because today “form follows finance”, as opposed to Le Corbusier’s dictum that form follows function. Housing is seen more as an investment than as a place to live or a long-term contribution to our environment.
Despite the fact that only about 5 per cent of new homes in the UK are designed by architects — the rest being the handiwork of volume housebuilders — many people would categorically assert that architects do not build beautiful buildings! My father would — and he would agree with King Charles’s attack on the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1984, when as Prince of Wales he described the designs for the National Gallery extension as a “monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend”.
What’s missing today is a collective notion of beauty and a way to implement it to a high standard. Buildings and streets are of extreme importance to the future of our country as they are what we will leave to the next generations.
So yes to more arts funding! But as William Lethaby, the English architect whose ideas had a major influence on the Arts and Crafts and Early Modern movements, said: “Bad plays need not be seen, books need not be read, but nothing but blindness or the numbing of our faculty of observation can protect us from buildings in the street.”
Amelia Hunter
London EC1, UK
