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Human Proportions
Following on from yesterday's story on plans for high-rise developments in Paris, EURSOC came across this fascinating article on British classical architect Quinlan Terry.
Terry has become something of a hate figure for the modernist architectural establishment for his quiet insistence on traditional architectural styles: The vocabularly of western European classicism, solid natural materials, buildings which complement their surroundings and, above all, working with human proportions. This latter feature has been a characteristic of western (and particularly British) architecture for centuries but has been deliberately played down by modernist gurus who see people and communities as little more than cogs in the machine.
Terry's Christian faith is said to have inspired his questioning of modernist dogmas. As a student in the 1960s, "Terry set out to learn what his professors forbad, travelling to see the great monuments of Western architecture, drawing the details of country churches, studying the simple streets of our not yet ruined towns, and in general equipping himself with the knowledge that an architect needs if he is to adapt his art to its surroundings, instead of destroying the surroundings in order to draw attention to his art."
His thesis failed; he resubmitted a paper based on the approved modernist designs in a spirit of satire, and was passed. It seems the establishment has never forgiven him; from dismissing his work as "pastiche", critics, including some of Britain's best-known architects, have attempted to block public commissions for Terry's practice. However, the architect's view on modernist architecture and its short-term, anti-environment and anti-human nature, is worth repeating here. As writer Roger Scruton notes,
"Terry has frequently pointed out, modernist buildings use materials that no one fully understands, which have a coefficient of expansion so large that all joints loosen within a few years, and which involve huge environmental damage in their production and in their inevitable disposal as waste within a few decades. Modernist buildings are ecological as well as aesthetic catastrophes: sealed environments dependent on a constant input of energy and subject to the 'sick-building syndrome' that arises when nobody can open a window or let in a breath of fresh air."
Quinlan & Francis Terry Architects
