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Nov 5, 2022Liked by Wessie du Toit

Great piece on vital subject; my added two cents would be: I feel like it never gets mentioned in this topic that places have a qualitative 'ubiety' or an 'is-ness' that is rooted in its tangible physical morphology and that has irreducible value, and that to substantially alter it i.e. through significant change/development, is to lose that 'is-ness'. I.e London has a 'face' that I love in the same way my partner has a face I love - I don't want either image to change, I don't need my partner to constantly be reshaped (say with surgery etc.) - because then it wouldn't be 'her'. It would be odd to label that instinct as being a kind of pessimist, incurious, or backwards. Likewise, in the built environment it seems obvious that we can't build anew without losing the image of what we love (as Beaudelaire knew) - I would just as strongly argue that is the opposite of pessimism but rather Love-of-What-Is, which in many ways is the spiritual goal of life - amor fati etc. In many ways the actual pessimism is the urge to see what is, continually become what is not; a kind of infantile state of always becoming, and never being. I agree, on a blank canvas there is something to be said as to why we might prefer to reproduce certain forms, but in historic urban areas, bluntly it is a zero sum game; existing buildings are demolished for non-existent ones, and even where existing buildings aren't demolished, their presence is destroyed by radically dissonant presence of new builds. I dunno, I just think that the architecture/built environment professions have a uniquely odd take on human nature here - in most circumstance it's a virtue to love what is, not a form of pessimism - but that stems from the field's bizarre sense of itself as a temporal touchstone.

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A very interesting read that has chimed quite heavily after visiting 'Poundbury', the pet project of our anti-modernist King. I was desperate to like it but I just couldn't. Everything works about it on paper, but your line 'a civilisation that has run out ideas,' and generally this whole piece echoes around the place quite strongly.

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We live in the age that symmetry forgot. We need no greater motive to hang on to the old than the knowledge of how appauling anything new will be.

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