Running on Fumes

In late November, we got into our car and started to drive from Hungary towards England. We spent our first night in Melk, which is a very pretty town clustered around a splendid Cathedral.

The abbey was built in the early eighteenth century.

Our second night was spent in Reitenhaslach in Bavaria, where a once thriving Cistercian monastery has now become a part of Munich University. The Cistercian hhurch remains in use and has a wonderful baroque interior:

It was created in the early eighteenth century.

Our third night was spent in Switzerland in Stein am Rhein. It is a small town with an old centre packed with half-timbered buildings, most with heavily decorated facades:

The buildings all date from medieval times.

In one of the buildings is a museum of domestic life in the 19th century, told through the stories of those who lived in the house itself. I will post about it later.

All I want to say in this post that I am concerned that we no longer seem to find it necessary to create beauty, especially beautiful buildings. What is the thing we have lost: patience? Or simply control of decisions? Is that the problem - decisions affecting locals are no longer made by locals but by people in far-off places, whose main interest in spending as little as possible and making as much profit as they can?

Is it too late for Europe? Can we find a way back to being a culture that makes the world more beautiful or are we destined to be a huge Disneyland of former loveliness, while our own civilisation is running purely on fumes?

STOP PRESS: After putting this post on the blog, I went downstairs and started going through the backlog of newspapers I've been ignoring. I came across this brilliant and apposite article. The writer begins by asserting:

"Every age has its own distinctive building type. For then19th century it was the railway station, for the 20th century it was the sky's raper. For the 21st century it looks like it'll be the data centre."

The writer goes on to point out that:

"Ancient peoples used to build temples to the gods they wanted to please and appease, to make them sacrifices and offerings. In the process they created architecture.  We are somehow going the opposite way, creating the gods that could destroy us while housing them in the most nondescript, generic buildings imaginable."

The whole article is immensely worth a read: