Twenty years ago the team at the Urban Task Force made the decision to replace the word “urban” with the word “quality” where they could in their report. The word urban, it was felt, had negative associations, but who was going to disagree with the notion of quality?

Twenty years later the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission has replaced the word “quality” with the word “beauty” and created an entirely different controversy. But they are still basically talking about the same thing.

Words matter, of course, and the suspicion of the architectural community was that the word “beauty” was code for “traditional” and was going to be a thinly veiled attack on contemporary design. That was certainly the case with the original Policy Exchange Report that gave birth to the commission which explicitly linked beauty with “traditional design”. This is why the spoof BD exposé of the workings of commission published on April 1 rang so true.

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