Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

Since the end of the Middle Ages, commerce has been gaining ground steadily. Productivity and efficiency have been increasingly important in everyday lives, especially with the development of the industrial revolution, and then telecommunications and the information revolution. Whatever the commodity, we expect it to be with us quicker than was possible a hundred years ago, or ten years ago. Whatever the task, we expect that it will be done more speedily and with less human effort. In order to make things more efficient, we divide up complex tasks into simple ones, and we all become more specialized. This causes fragmentation of knowledge. Our cultures tend to separate out, so that even the mass media, like television, now reach smaller more specialized audiences, because there are more stations than there used to be. It would be astonishing if, against this cultural background, architecture were to find a new consensus. The generality of architecture never conforms to the canons of taste of any particular ‘high culture’. The traditions of high culture in architecture are pieced together from carefully selected buildings of the finest quality that remind us of what can be achieved by noble endeavour. It is comforting to think that we will not have to explain to an archaeologist from another age how it came to be that we were surrounded by buildings such as those that we actually have, and we turn a blind eye to most of them. Buildings always tell the truth, but in an ambiguous way, bearing many possible interpretations. In Manchester, a new shopping centre has great atrium spaces and classical columns with gilded capitals, looking the very image of excess, like a setting from the last days of Rome. I expect that architecture will connect with a variety of élite and popular traditions, and we will continue to find buildings that are close together on the ground that connect with cultures from disparate parts of the globe. The place where I have seen this tendency at its most marked is in Singapore, where I came across a Mongolian café next to an Italian–American pizzeria, with an Irish pub across the way. They were in a shopping and leisure complex that had been made by converting an old colonial building, the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus, the chapel of which is still in use, especially for weddings, and is ablaze with the light from rows of sparkling chandeliers.

Chapter 1 Buildings have meaning

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