[lbo-talk] Crap architecture

[James Heartfield]

No doubt there are more than value judgements in principle to be made in architecture.
But I have to say that in my ten years writing about Britain’s useless and frustrated construction industry, every single judgement I have ever read is just social conservatism masquerading as aesthetic critique. There are no end of snobs bemoaning every new development of every kind, from Ian Fleming’s assault on the architect Goldfinger, right through to the ‘New Urbanism’s polemics against the suburbs. What these screeds invariably mean is not that they hate the buildings, but that they hate the people that live or work in them.