Spirit and Place - Healing our Environment?

Architectural Review, The, Nov, 2002 by Boaz Ben Manasseh

By Christopher Day. Oxford: Architectural Press. 2002. [pounds sterling]24.99

Christopher Day sounds like a decent, well-meaning, experienced chap, but his book is just frightful. It is a shapeless, preachy, meander through some personal opinions about giving buildings 'soul'. It scatters italics -- 'life-energy', 'thinking', 'tradition' -- instead of adopting a clear structure. It is full of junk history, such as the rustic ideal of the country cottage, which he appears not to realize is an entirely modern idea; or the tiresome solecism, that everyone likes 'Georgian' architecture, but that 'speculative development' is necessarily bad.

It lacks both research and style. Thirty years after Byker, twenty years after the housing association work promoted by the Liberals in Liverpool, ten years after certain 'community architecture' methods have been entirely discredited, and five years after Jeremy Till's memorable angels with dirty faces', it really is not enough to give us a simplistic sermon on the desirability of communal participation and charge us [pounds sterling]24.99. Worse is to come: there are aphorisms that the Reader's Digest would be ashamed of. 'A well-handled old leather book acquires something akin to the aura of a wise old person.' 'Unlike animals, we are individualities on personal journeys through life.' References to 'ensouling auras' and 'cosmic powered living processes' sound to me the sort of thing that old-school Presbyterian ministers used to refer to, justifiably in my opinion, as 'devil worship'.

Sue Roaf's introduction notes that when reading Day's text, she feels that he is actually speaking to her. It is certainly tiresomely colloquial. Butterworth-Heinemann's Architectural Press seems to be bravely trying to find architect writers who write about substantial issues, but they should have done better than this. They should have given the book some shape; removed the sentences without verbs; substituted 'fewer' for 'less' on virtually every occurrence; corrected the spellings of 'Solzenhitzin', 'Ghandi' and 'Mandella'. It's inexcusable.