Attack on architecture to make the blood boil

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Roger Scruton, the renowned right-wing philosopher, has decided to set his sights at architecture.

Writing in American critical magazine The New Criterion, he starts by describing Mohammed Atta's attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11 as 'expressing a long-standing grudge against architectural modernism, which he had already voiced in his master's dissertation for the University of Hamburg architecture school.'

After bemoaning the transformation of the old cities of the Middle East, Scruton moves on to attack the designs for Ground Zero, 'a boring array of unsightly towers around a pointless open space,' before moving on to the work of another philosopher, John Silber, former president of Boston University.

Silber is the author of Architecture of the Absurd, an attack on starchitects that Scruton supports. Few of his arguments - a return to drawing, to an appreciation of the natural orders etc. etc. are original - but the fluency and vitriol that he employs are without parallel. Well-worth reading, but maybe you should get your blood pressure checked first.