Art kitch tecture

Straying out of my field a bit here, but one of the things I find frustrating about the border towns and in particular Ludlow is a certain preciousness. This manifests itself, with one or two minor exceptions, as a refusal to believe that anything worthwhile has happened in architecture, building design and materials’ development since the end of the nineteenth century.
One of Ludlow’s great visual strengths is that it has a mishmash of beautiful frontages built in various styles and periods. There are stone, brick and timber frames of high quality, usually burying a jerrybuilt hovel somewhere behind the façade. However this organic upgrading ground to a halt around 1900 to be replaced with pastiche. Don’t get me wrong, pastiche can be a useful tool in the armoury of expression, I make use of it myself in my art. However when it is virtually all pervasive it becomes stultifying. We have building developments of toy town housing with pseudo Victorian ornament stuck on them, a new police station that looks like a Wimpey home on steroids, yet doesn’t even have a lockup, and infills of fake Georgian façades for modern apartments. An affront to my eyeballs that I have the misfortune to see every day is the ghastly development called Galdeford Gate, built on the site of the old police station. I would guess that this architectural concoction is supposed to imitate one of the town’s fine streets, with a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Instead it looks as if a child has been given carte blanche with a box of mixed period building blocks. We are presented with a cacophony of pastiche in a horrendous jumble. It’s a bloody great mess of fakery.
Some weeks after writing the above I find that venting my spleen on this development has allowed me to view it with a slightly more kindly eye, or perhaps it’s just that I’ve discovered another new building in Ludlow I like even less. The new Travel lodge out on the bypass seems to have nothing whatsoever to offer architecturally. Dear reader I challenge you to name one visually redeeming aspect to this building, despite my rather flattering photograph of it.
The most galling thing about this is that it need not be that way, as the minor exceptions prove. The glass fronted entrance to Ludlow Assembly Rooms, although completely modern in design and construction, fits in perfectly. So do Ludlow College’s new art and design building and the service tower on the refurbished Marston’s building down by the railway station. The very contrast between the decorative brick building and the glass column with its curved roof is refreshing to the eye.New technology and design concepts, leading to energy self sufficient buildings need to happen and the best buildings of the future will be the ones that take this on board, using function to dictate form and allowing the mixture of materials to develop their own vernacular, according to their properties. If the town cannot see this it will become a pastiche of its own history, a kind of theme park, and disappear up its own fundament.