The Way We Build Now

Chapter Seven

Public Buildings

One issue that particularly confronts the designer of public buildings is what attitude to adopt to monumental architecture. In the past, the deliberate aggrandisement, which is part and parcel of monumental architecture, has been used to express differences of status or to symbolise what have been thought to be important ideas, such as the omnipotence of the law or other kinds of authority, divine or secular. But it has also been, consciously or not, a vehicle which expresses a ruling ethos, in the way that bourgeois liberalism is represented by the Corn Exchanges in England or by the decorous residences which were contemporary in other parts of Europe. In recent times, however, the formal satisfactions provided ...