27

In a liberal society, there is as much disagreement on what constitutes the best life as there is on what constitutes the best built environment to live it in. “People are imprisoned in Germany for denying the Holocaust,” he added. “It gives me a great deal of pride to think he’s never coming out of there,” said Diane Derzis, who runs a Birmingham, Alabama, women’s clinic Rudolph bombed in 1998. Horace Walpole struck a blow by building the world’s first Gothic house, a picturesque pile on the banks of the Thames, which he called Strawberry Hill. “He should never see daylight again.” “We are forbidden to have such a conference in Germany,” he said. ” All my childhood, we waited for something like this.” As John Ruskin observed, we don’t want our buildings merely to shelter us; we also want them to speak to us. But of what? “It is a closed-off world designed to isolate inmates from social and environmental stimuli, with the ultimate purpose of causing mental illness and chronic physical conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and arthritis.”


Critical Response:

« | »