"There have been architects who are geniuses—Michelangelo, Palladio, Frank Lloyd Wright. But a city is not the work of geniuses. It is the work of humble craftsmen and also the by-product of its own continuing conversation with itself. A city is a constantly evolving fabric, patched and repaired for our changing uses, in which order emerges by an "invisible hand" from the desire of people to get on with their neighbours. That is what produces a city such as Venice or Paris, where even the great monuments—St Mark's, Notre Dame, the Place Vendôme, the Scuola Grande di San Rocco—soothe the eye and radiate a sense of belonging. In the past, geniuses did their best to harmonise with street, sky and public space—like Bernini at St Peter's Square—or to create a vocabulary, as Palladio did, that could become the lingua franca of a city in which all could be at home.
In contrast, the new architecture, typified by Gehry's costly Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, by Norman Foster's lopsided City Hall in London, by Richard Rogers' kitchen-utensil Lloyds Building, or by the shiny gadgets of Zaha Hadid, is designed to challenge the surrounding order and to stand out as the work of some inspired artist who does not build for people, but sculpts space for his own expressive ends." - Roger Scruton
Do we want to craft players of the former or closer to the latter examples of architects? My experience says the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of the challenging latter with the game desperate for more of a skillful harmonizing power.
How does one break through to a game of harmony when the game is full of challengers?
