Arthur, At 11:56 03/10/02 -0400, you wrote: <<<< When someone came up with the idea of building according to price per square foot the notion of soaring works simply faded away. In some ways that was the major complaint vis a vis the twin towers. Large, modular, banal. Large widgets. >>>>
As an economist, surely you realise that the price per square foot has always been important? The builder of the Pyramid of Cheops did the most careful calculations in order to obtain the mostest for the leastest. Gothic master stonemasons and Renaissance architects sometimes had to tender for their jobs and always worked to careful budgets. This notion of architectural beauty is product of Tennyson and his ilk and is not yet two centuries old. There was no such concept before then. Near here we have Laycock Abbey, partly Early and Middle Gothic, partly Perpendicular. Its cloisters are Perpendicular in style but recent repair work reveals that this was but a highly embellished veneer laid on top of what some today would regard as equally beautiful Middle Gothic walls and vaulting. The monks of that time decided they wanted the latest fashion to show how prosperous they were and didn't care that they were hiding beautiful stonework. The builders of Bath Abbey, a beautiful Gothic building of undoubted "soaring beauty" -- a modern phrase I would not quarrel with -- tore down the previous Celtic church and monastic buildings to make way for it. Three hundred years after this, the whole of Bath and *all* its beautiful Gothic churches and *all* its wonderful stone Tudor buildings and *all* its ordinary Tudor houses (except two) were torn down and replaced by the Georgian builders such as John Woods. It's a beautiful city now to which many thousands of tourists come every year but, if some of the Medieval cities of Europe are anything to go by, pre-Georgian Bath would have been even more beautiful to our eyes today. Even more beautiful, of course, was Bath in Roman times with its temples, ampitheatre, forum and so forth -- all plundered by later builders, of course, to make buildings that were functional for their own times. But don't take my word for it Arthur! Ask any good historian you like. Ask him -- or her -- whether builders and architects of the past built for function (which included the projection of power and prestige) or for what we know as "beauty" today. Keith ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------ Keith Hudson, General Editor, Handlo Music, http://www.handlo.com 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727; mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________________________________
