Masterplanning

For people like me who believe the housing question was pretty much solved by 1959 with the house we live in (above) and that the rest ever since has merely been a question of political contingency and commercial squalor, mucking around over student masterplans all day can bring some irritation. The thing is, you either let the students make all the terrible mistakes they have got it in them to make and hope that they will never do it again - ie be liberal with their liberalism, or you rather categorically tell them to stop their nonsense and learn to do it properly. Certainly in the first place you'd need a heightened sense of humour/irony/absurdity and in the second large tear ducts.

It is possible that Liberalism+Liberalism=Disaster, in short it brings around a kind of torpid lack of faith in anything, political malaise and eventual fascism and gas chambers. That's at least what happened to Germany in the twenties and if I read the signs correctly it's pretty much what's happening here today. Goebbels biography provides a straightforward lesson. The guy was a HOPELESS ADOLESCENT, positively marinated in malaise. And look what happened!

I also begged the question how many students had been good at maths at school. To study at my architecture school back in the seventies you had to have maths A level. Yesterday I understood why for the first time in thirty years. Being barely proficient at maths might be an indication that you could apply logic. I suspect the principals at the (otherwise godawful) Bristol University understood this at least and put it in as a rather useful caveat to the admissions procedure to avoid faffing about over portfolios and suchlike at all.

Such nouse is in short supply.