ARCHITECTURE, MORE THAN ANY OTHER art, is iterative and referential: more often than not, buildings look like other buildings. This fact underpins much of the anxiety that exists in architecture about individual genius, originality, pastiche and copyism. In Britain we are often selfconscious about our buildings, we have a vestigial memory of the days when we were a cultural backwater off the coast of Europe, the engine-room of the medieval gothic and renaissance classicism.
One moment that encapsulates something about the deeper principles of good architectural design that can thrive in these islands, is the so-called “English
