From the thatched-roofed orbital pub of the King Charles III Space Station — a structure Nicholas Boys Smith gamely declines to call a pastiche — Tom and Calum welcome the campaigner for architectural beauty, founder of Create Streets, and former co-chair, alongside Roger Scruton, of the government’s beauty commission. The opening question is whether you could ever build a city worth living in on the Moon, and his answer is more practical than you would expect: in large part, we already know how.
Boyes Smith’s case is that human settlements take remarkably similar shapes wherever you go — Stockholm, Marrakesh, Malta, a town in the north of Norway — and only the proportions change. Hot climates produce narrow streets and high walls to dodge a murderous sun, a logic later codified in the Quran; cold ones spread their streets out to chase the light. Once you have breathable air on the Moon, he argues, you would end up with something startlingly close to how we already live, only built from moon rock, rendered and quite possibly painted in pastel pinks and yellows, like a Cornish village in orbit. The same goes for the British Antarctic Territory, which Tom is delighted to point out is mostly exposed rock rather than ice.
On the Moon as in a Cornish village, his instinct is to build from what is to hand. Granite, he notes, was the original sustainable material — cheap, durable and loved — until canals and railways made it viable to drag stone and brick across the country, the same shift that once made coal in London cost several times what it did in Newcastle. And building well is not a luxury. Across visual preference surveys in Britain, America, Holland and Norway, large majorities, often 70 to 90 percent, prefer the same things — texture, gentle symmetry, a coherent complexity that rewards a second look — and people who live somewhere they find attractive turn out to be measurably healthier in body and mind, across party, region and race. The striking exception is architects: Boys Smith revives a near-forgotten study by David Halpern showing that while everyone agrees on which faces are beautiful, architecture students’ favourite building tends to be precisely everyone else’s least favourite, and the longer the training, the wider the gulf.
How did a civilisation that once built like this forget how? He points to the mid-century caesura, when architecture schools across the West binned several hundred years of accumulated craft, in some cases literally throwing the plaster casts students used to draw from into the skip. But recovering that inheritance is not pastiche: you can always tell a Victorian Gothic church from Salisbury Cathedral, and Selfridges is a steel-framed modern building wearing classical dress. The Victorians, he suggests, were the original Anglofuturists — Joseph Paxton, a self-trained gardener, throwing up Crystal Palace; military engineers raising the Royal Albert Hall on a steel dome they were genuinely afraid would collapse. All of which makes the proposed £39 billion restoration of the Palace of Westminster, not a typo, the more dispiriting, complete with a scheme to scoop out the interior and refit it in what he calls Ikea-pastiche modernism. His counter-proposal, aired in The Critic, is to demolish the Queen Elizabeth II Centre, raise a fifteen-storey Gothic tower in its place, and let the luxury flats inside pay for Parliament’s visitor centre.
The back half ranges gloriously: a Star Wars taxonomy worked out with his son over the summer holidays, in which the Death Star is the apotheosis of functionalist modernism and Naboo is conspicuously on the side of good; a brisk dismissal of the charge that a fondness for columns makes you a neo-Nazi, on the grounds that he doesn’t believe in dressing up and invading other countries; and a genuinely moving account of co-chairing the beauty commission with a dying Roger Scruton — funny, kind, disarming, and armed with a lethal bureaucratic trick of asking anyone with an unhelpful idea to go away and write a two-page memo on it.
The episode explores:
Why human settlements take the same shapes from Stockholm to Marrakesh, and what that means for building on the Moon
Lunar Cornwall: pastel-rendered moon rock and the case for local stone everywhere
Beauty as a public health measure rather than a luxury, and why the data holds across party, region and race
The Halpern study, or why architecture students are the only people on Earth who prefer ugly buildings
The mid-century caesura, when architecture schools binned centuries of craft along with the actual plaster casts
Why copying the past doesn’t make a pastiche, with Selfridges as a steel-framed building in classical dress
The Victorians as the original Anglofuturists, from Paxton’s Crystal Palace to the Albert Hall dome nobody was sure would stay up
Build a Gothic tower, don’t spend £39 billion turning Parliament into a 21st-century building
Whether rebuilding the burned-down Clandon Park is genuinely “dishonest,” as the National Trust insists
Why “neo-Nazi” gets hurled at anyone who likes a column, and why stripped classicism was mostly an American state project
The Star Wars theory of architecture: the Death Star is pure modernism, and Naboo is on the side of good
Roger Scruton’s trick for killing an unhelpful meeting
