The Soul of the World

To my way of thinking a true street is like a garden–not a means but an end.

The architect does not build for the private client, but for the city. All of us are compelled to live with the result, which must therefore be offensive to no one. The case is no different from clothing, which ought to be original only if it first conforms.

These unarticulated verticals and blank screens of wall, these flattened deserts that once were streets, with the empty lots still grieving for their vanished houses–all speak of a flight from the city to some distant barricaded place, where neighborliness expires and people live for themselves alone.

When we see the world exclusively as an assemblage of objects, then nothing is rescued from barter and exchange.

And now, destroying the home, we are making a new kind of fallen world.

Even the most elaborate corner can be seen, therefore, to be the logical outcome of intelligible rules, so as to look less like an intrusion than a culmination.

Traditional buildings have orientation: they face the world, not always in one direction only, but in such a way as to address the space before them. They are not edges to the public space but visitors that congregate along it.

A public space is not an unowned space, but one in which the many spheres of ownership come to a negotiated boundary.

We deface the world when we scribble "me" all over it, and invite others to do the same. Beauty is the face of the community, and ugliness the attack on that face by the solipsist and the scavenger.

– Roger Scruton "The Soul of the World"