Architecture News & Views We Need More Adventurous Buildings

Date Published:

27/05/2008

Alain de Botton, presenter of The Perfect Home, explains why housing developers should stop relying on the past for inspiration and start being bold with our buildings.

The oddest thing about British house builders is their attachment to making new houses look like old ones. You get a feel for this habit driving along the A131 southwest of Braintree in Essex. The view through the windscreen is of a typical 21st century commercial landscape: a mixture of industrial sheds, business parks, motels and petrol stations, punctuated by unploughed fields across which crisp packets and children's balloons occasionally drift. Then, past a junction near Tesco, a new housing development surges up from behind the modest cover of some gaunt trees.

Credit: Owen Gale

Hundreds of immaculate houses, seemingly only just out of their packets, stretch out across the Essex flatlands. There are rows of low-slung cottages, imitating the forms of their 18th century counterparts, painted a variety of sweet pastel colours. There are more formal avenues abutting in Georgian style crescents. There is a village green, with ducks and a new-ancient bridge, and a Palladian-style country mansion, which, on closer inspection, reveals itself to be subdivided into flats.

In the big cities, among those whom the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu ironically nicknamed 'the cultural elites', a pared-down Modernism may be the predictable architectural style of choice, but in the nation as a whole, it is communities like this one that seem to win the affections of residents and the attentions of prospective buyers.