Sadiq Khan’s Housing Design Adviser: Traditional Architecture ‘Offensive’

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Sadiq Khan’s “Housing Design Advocate” has denounced conventional structure as “offensive” and mentioned it “harks back to oppression”.

Dinah Bornat made the remarks on social media in response to a submit that includes a brand new home within the Georgian type shared by the Create Streets social enterprise, which regularly promotes conventional designs and road layouts.

“The fortress style/display of wealth resonates through time. I wonder is it starting to resonate just a little too much for a lot of us? Imperialism starting to look, well, offensive? Just a thought,” she declared in a now-deleted Twitter tirade preserved by the Guido Fawkes political weblog, earlier than clarifying that she was “talking about offence caused by colonialism. Which arguably goes beyond offence.”

She went on to complain that the alleged “replica approach” taken by the constructing’s designers “stifles cultural debate” and that defining it as stunning was “politically troubling”.

“If beauty harks back to oppression we are on very dangerous ground,” she recommended.

Bornat’s remarks on the Graeco-Roman-style classical constructing left some social media customers perplexed, with one asking her if she was referring to the oppression of the Roman Empire.

“I was actually talking about the Georgians and [British] colonialism,” she shot again. “But their style harks back to the Romans of course.”

“We all knew it wouldn’t stop at statues,” groaned Save Our Statues campaigner Robert Poll.

Vast majority of public would regard this 1929 modernist imaginative and prescient for Regent St with utter horror & but it is acknowledged goals just like so many schemes nonetheless being constructed as we speak: ‘to let in as a lot mild and provides as a lot area as doable’ by way of @Londonist https://t.co/ixMBBxxmIE pic.twitter.com/Jzbvolocya

— createstreets (@createstreets) December 10, 2017

Georgian structure discovered a defender in opposition to Mayor Khan’s adviser within the type of former Country Life editor and historical past of structure graduate Clive Aslet, who denounced her remarks as “part of the statue-toppling agenda that tars the country houses of the National Trust as products of an economy which condoned slavery.”

“Modern architects never give up. Even though Georgian architecture, with its magnificent squares, handsome streets and well-proportioned, flexibly designed houses, is hugely popular with the public, the avant-garde of the profession hates it with a passion,” Aslet Lamented.

“This style of Greek religious buildings spread around the Mediterranean, was adopted by the Romans, exported through their Empire, preserved by Byzantium, revived in the Renaissance and adopted by British aristocrats, whose education consisted principally in the reading of Greek and Latin texts,” he defined.

“Why are they so attractive? Because of their orderliness, their approachable scale, and the satisfying rhythm of the repeating elements of doorcase and sash window,” he insisted, rejecting Mr Bornat’s characterisation of the type as “the architecture of oppression”.

Harvard University Architecture Historian: Notre-Dame Burning Down Is ‘Act of Liberation’ https://t.co/135hmyrfDz

— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) April 17, 2019