A return to the pattern or design of the past – dismissed as pastiche, the worst of all architectural crimes, far worse than destroying an immemorial townscape – would indicate a deficiency of imagination, inventiveness and originality, all the qualities that make the artist, at least in the romantic conception of the artist. And architects, in their own conception, are above all artists: artists, moreover, when it is widely believed that the purpose of art is to challenge, to question, to transgress, never to celebrate, to harmonise, to console, to give meaning.
How different from the spirit of A R Powys, of whom his brother writes:The bulk of his life’s work lies where he would have had it lie, in the silent and unapplauding masonry and timber ofthe irreplaceable buildings he saved from ruin…He draws attention to his ‘self-effacement,’ a characteristic that architects today – like almost everyone else – rejects as treason to the self.
The older I get, the less I care about my self. I hope that some of my poems turn out to have a lasting appeal to some. But I don't care if my name is attached to any of them. After all, there is plenty of good work, in all the fields of artistic endeavor, that can only be attributed to Anonymous.
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