Just because your city is already filled with beautiful buildings hundreds of years old does not mean you can stop building. Populations grow and shift, technological needs change, and sooner or later you need to build. But how do you build new buildings in a way that respects and works with the old ones?
Walking around Edinburgh I saw two fundamentally different approaches to this problem. One was to create what might be called “neoclassical Scottish” architecture. These are buildings that were clearly built in the late 20th or early 21st century, and belong to the modern era, but that somehow reflect ideas from the older buildings around them. Perhaps a choice of stone color, or a general shape and form, or window placement, or a roof that hints of architectural details in the ancient rooftops around it.
The other approach is to go completely modern — glass edifices so different from the ancient structures around them that they seem to be from a different world (which, in a sense, they are). These are invariably built in a plain and unadorned style. We’re not talking about Frank Gehry here, or anything even remotely suggesting a lipstick case. Just straightforward glass boxes accented by simple dark frames.
I am not a particular fan of modern architecture. Yet I found the latter approach quite pleasing, whereas the former was rather monstrous in its effect. The glass boxes come across mainly as unassuming backdrops for the beauty of the ancient structures around them — backdrops that make no attempt to compete.
In contrast, the neoclassical approach creates a sort of frankenbuilding, something that does not have any of the rough beauty and integrity of the ancient buildings around it. These buildings bear roughly the same relationship to their forebears as a typical Hollywood RomCom bears to “Pride and Prejudice”.
There’s a lesson here, and I suspect it generalizes to all sorts of situations.