VINDICATED
THE news that the Secretary of State for the Environment has rejected MI Palum- bo's project for Mansion House Square comes as a profound relief. The sanity and objectivity of the public inquiry system is vindicated and the Government has 'Let's hope it comes out.' avoided the opprobrium and the row which would have occurred if it emerged that the
report made by Mr Stephen Marks, the Department of the Environment's inspec- tor, had been overruled. Mr Palumbo perhaps deserves sympathy now that the dream which he has pursued for so long and so tenaciously has ended, but it is the nature of democracy that one rich man's dream may not be inflicted on an unsym- pathetic public. Mr Palumbo's supporters will argue that the rejection of the scheme represents a victory for negative conservat- ism over progress and modern architecture. This is simply not true. Man- sion House Square was rejected because, in its destructiveness, it was profoundly out of date. The tower block itself, designed by the late Mies van der Rohe, might have been acceptable on another site but not on the chosen site and in place of existing streets and listed buildings. The real point is, however, that British architecture has changed since the 1960s and changed for the better. Younger architects are pre- pared to learn from the past while being flexible and modern in outlook. The tragedy is that clients like Mr Palumbo turn instead to the committed modernist gen- eration of architects, both living and dead. What a younger generation can do is demonstrated by the exhibition Tomor- row's Architecture at the Warwick Arts Trust. It is an exhibition which property developers really ought to visit.
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