"Uninspired" buildings that offer "desultory" results, "absurdist, nihilistic and egocentric" architecture and Victorian terraced housing "left to rot".
"The replacement buildings are as uninspired as their counterparts at the Pennsylvania Plaza complex in New York, and they offer the same desultory results - bland commercial modernism above, a rat-maze train station below."
Chicago Tribune
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"The idea is absurd, and it is no surprise that the architecture arising from it is essentially absurdist, nihilistic and egocentric, as are the principles of historic preservation and architecture criticism that flow from it."
Projo
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"Not only have swathes of good Victorian terraced housing been emptied and left to rot, prey to vandals and arsonists, but now we discover that these areas will be blighted again by the sub-standard replacement housing. It is utter madness."
Architects' Journal
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"One, you install the screens and nobody uses them, ever - people are set in their ways and the technology dies from disinterest. Two, there's some initial uptake, but because you designed the system so rigidly, they give up. Three, the best case is that people take it up in some way that it is enormously successful, but it has nothing at all to do with what the planners and strategists ever imagined."
Fast Company
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"But for a discipline that professes to question basic principles and constantly reinterpret and revise, its practitioners can demonstrate an unsettling acquiescence, a willingness to accept the brief and the status quo. This is particularly true today when design, as part of the fabled 'creative economy', is expected to shoulder responsibility for recreating a mixed economy, to effectively replace manufacturing and industry with intellectual product, the making of which can less easily be outsourced."
Financial Times
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