Few Classical architects or their clients felt any impulse towards originality. Fidelity to the canon was what mattered; repetition was the norm.

The only problem with unrestricted choice, however, is that it tends not to lie so far from outright chaos.

there will be times when the most congenial of locations will be unable to dislodge our sadness or misanthropy.

surfaces. They have imagined living in unattainably expensive houses pictured in magazines and then felt sad, as one does on passing an attractive stranger in a crowded street.

For over a thousand discontinuous years in the history of the West, a beautiful building was synonymous with a Classical building, a structure with a temple front, decorated columns, repeated ratios and a symmetrical façade.

A prohibition against discussions of beauty in architecture was imposed by a new breed of men, engineers, who had achieved professional recognition only in the late eighteenth century,

What is a beautiful building?

‘Home life today is being paralysed by the deplorable notion that we must have furniture,’ her architect protested. ‘This notion should be rooted out and replaced by that of equipment.’

Yet, despite this indifference, the new men of science seemed capable of building the most impressive and, in many cases, the most seductive structures of their confused age.