Defending tower blocks
Sir: I have no real wish to disagree with a Man whose heart is patently in the right place and whose spirit is mighty enough to wrestle with the rhetorical questions he raised under his article 'The weakness of democracy (5 August). However, there's a great deal of codswallop written about the evil of tower 'blocks in post-war town planning and Christopher Booker's recent article (7 October) doesn't help. Just as there are, say, poets of the Left and poets of the Right, so there are architects of the Left and architects of the Right. Corbusier produced tower blocks, but then so did Mies van der Rohe whose magnificent and immaculately organised residential blocks at Lakeshore Drive, Chicago, are surely symbols of the great American dream? No, it is not the architectural form which is wrong, it is the system in which they are commissioned, managed and let. When the local authorities in England begin selling off their tower blocks (as they must surely do) to private enterprise and market forces dictate who lives there and how they are kept, you will have a very different picture.
Robin Moore Ede 72 Wells Street, London W1
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