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There are entire television programmes about people wanting a nasty little bedsit in London and a home in the country where they live in a "real" community, not seeing the irony of their proposition.

The dissection of the town he talks about was done by Councillors acting on the recommendations of Roads Engineers. Roads Engineers have destroyed the heart of our cities.

The architecture of our cities has been destroyed by Corporate Crap, produced as a function of our modern day Frankensteins, Corporations. They are the manifestations of Corporations and Council Planners and architects whose scale-less design is a compromise forced on them by their programme briefs.

Take a building much over eight stories and you lose the battle with scale. You need a new paradigm with which to express it. Plant a mega building into any town or city and it takes over its environment. Single use buildings are the worst in that respect.

Take a walk through the City of London to see the damage pandering to Big Corporate does to any city. The NatWest tower is a prime example of this crap. Contrast this with the relationship between the Houses of Parliament and the cityscape or Buckingham Palace.

The Victorians understood the appropriate scale of innovation and development. Their work gave the eye things to "hang on" to and identify with. There is no visual treat in a sheet of glass. Its a one trick pony and not a very good one. If buildings do not offer the city something back (and a REFLECTION of other buildings gets old VERY quickly) then they should not be permitted.

As for the scale-less, reference-less monstrosities produced by OMA, they are a total disaster and will be seen in years to come as being the sterile flag-waving attention-seeking that they are. Shock and Awe masquerading as Architecture. That's a bit like an atomic bomb. It makes a big impression the first time, but no one really wants to see it a second time.

(Probably not a good day for me to be posting or saying stuff like this but dammit, someone has to say it)

And while I'm in this humour why does this page - hosted in Britain and about British Architecture - appear to have and American spellchecker?

Councillors
programme

Both "highlighted" - what's that about? The slow takeover of the world by the software exports of a culture that's too lazy to learn to spell properly?

spellchecker

Also "highlighted" - not only can they not spell but they cannot stay on top of current developments in the language?

LAWL.

(and that's "highlighted" as well!)