QotD: Modern Architecture

Architecture offers quite extraordinary opportunities to serve the community, to enhance the landscape, refresh the environment and to advance mankind — the successful architect needs training to overcome these pitfalls however, and start earning some serious money. I get all kinds of people from the schools and universities and my job is manifold and various. Firstly, of course, it's visual. Young people use their eyes — to be a good architect in Britain today you need to more than use your eyes, you must have them surgically removed. But you don't just have to be blind to be a modern architect, you must develop a lively sense of contempt for your fellow man, so early meetings with borough planners and council administrators are essential.

Next a carefully planned system of mind-direction seminars, as we like to call them. In these we show our students film of old buildings, old village communities, interviews with noted conservationists such as the late John Betjeman and His Royal Highness Prince Charles. By disseminating toxic gasses and introducing mild electric shocks we induce a feeling of nausea, sickness and acute physical pain, which in time is associated with those images. Next we show film of large glass boxes, rough concrete towers and enormous steel girders, all the time stimulating the students with underseat vibromassage and soothing selections of Mozart, while they drink venerable clarets and smoke jazz cigarettes. By this means an aversion to old forms of architecture and a loving acceptance of the new can be effectively inculcated.

"Sir Jeremy Creep", Principal of the London College of Architects, quoted by Stephen Fry in Paperweight, 1992