Building Beautiful

Architecture and urbanism were among Roger Scruton’s central interests, and he devoted the final year of his life to chairing the British Government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission. Scruton championed the enduring relevance of traditional ways of building, studying the ways in which architecture can humanise or dehumanise the places in which we live, and interrogating the modernist charge that traditional architecture today must be an inauthentic ‘pastiche’.

Through the work of Scruton and many others, traditional architecture and urbanism have strengthened steadily in recent decades, returning from a point of near-extinction in the mid-twentieth century. Until recently, however, they were restricted chiefly to residential architecture for private clients. This is beginning to change. There is now widespread interest in many features of traditional cities, including their walkability, their popularity, their density, and their positive effects on health and wellbeing. This offers traditional architects and urbanists the opportunity to break back into the mainstream, vindicating traditional practice not as a boutique style of private villas, but as a way to build the cities of the twenty-first century.

In Building Beautiful, Dr Samuel Hughes interviews the leading figures in traditional architecture and urbanism today. The series explores both timeless questions about the nature of traditional building, and urgent questions about the challenges and opportunities it now faces. Why did traditional architecture vanish during the twentieth century, after flourishing for so many centuries? What are its prospects of renewal? How does its predicament vary across the world? Through eight discussions with an international range of practitioners, we will develop a unique overview of one of the most important themes of our day.