Letters
So Rowan Moore bravely (if belatedly) dares to question the immaculate reputation of Norman Foster and I send in a short letter in support and, lo and behold, the latest AJ devotes three columns of the correspondence page to outraged rebuttal together with an editorial and yet more feeble sycophancy on the Hello! page (formerly known as Astragal).
Might not this over-reaction be seen as a little hysterical? And what accounts for this extraordinary reverence and the widespread refusal to accept that the overweening and unprecedented dominance of the Foster office might be bad for architecture (and society)? Our modern credulous cult of celebrity? Selfinterest? Opportunism? Fear?
Anyway, I hope that in future we might be able to read just a little objective criticism of, say, the outrageously over-hyped and deeply flawed British Museum Great Court, even if I do not expect most readers to agree with me that to give peerages to architects is self-evidently ridiculous.
Gavin Stamp, by e-mail
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