The Guardian Picks Up On The Contentious Debate Surrounding Modernist Preservation In The UK

A trio of concerned letter writers replied to a March 31st opinion piece by The Guardian’s Owen Hatherley in which the critic declared that “hardline modern architecture is now something of a cult.”

“A living city has to strike some sort of balance between avoiding the strangulation and depopulation that happens when you conserve everything, and the visual slurry that occurs if you let developers do what they like,” Hatherley wrote. “The result has been a new tension between different notions of conservation. This is a tension that serves mainly to benefit property developers, who can make money both from new buildings, and as ‘saviors’ of great modern buildings at the cost of destroying their original purely social purpose, as has happened in the privatisation of London’s Keeling House or Sheffield’s Park Hill.”