Criticism
The Arndale Centres were largely successful, but they also attracted a great deal of criticism as they often involved demolishing old buildings – particularly Victorian buildings – and replacing them with modern concrete constructions in a brutalist style.
- "There are people today amassing stupendous fortunes by systematically destroying our historic centres," wrote architectural writer James Lees-Milne, in 1964. "Eventually, all the buildings of the area - good, bad and indifferent - are replaced with chain stores, supermarkets and blocks of flats devoid of all distinction, and all looking alike."
The value of the Wandsworth Arndale was maximised by the high-rise tower blocks built on top of the mall, which helped it to become, according to some commentators, "one of London’s great architectural disasters".
Read more about this topic: Arndale Centre
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“... criticism ... makes very little dent upon me, unless I think there is some real justification and something should be done.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)