A trenchant (and pretty accurate) dissection of the way in which the architectural profession is obsessed with style above content.
It even includes an intelligible (and again accurate) quote from John Prescott!
I know that some of our leading architects have criticised [Poundbury], but I also know that it was architects who gave awards to the concrete monstrosities that were built as homes for ordinary people.
(To be fair to Prescott I think his problem is that his enthusiasm runs faster than his tongue. )
ADDENDUM
I followed up one of the comments to this post which came from a British architect. I don't know if this is because of an unfortunate experience (see the section on Upton in Northamptonshire) but the description of a design code doesn't entirely gell with my understanding of how they would work.
Unfortunately, we weren't allowed to progress to the second stage because two out of the two hundred houses on our plan were designed as three storey when the design code had specified only two 2 storey on that specific street.
If a design for a development of 200 houses has got to the level of detail where the layout of streets is known, it seems rather silly to invite submissions for a design competition to build those houses. Good practice I would have thought would require the spaces between the buildings to spring from the buildings, not the road layout. It looks more like a misapplication of the idea to me, unless I'm missing something.
