At Salisbury Review, Dalrymple writes of a building in Peru that has been favorably compared to Macchu Picchu and been deemed “the best new building in the world”, when it very clearly is not. He takes particular umbrage at the statement by one of the building’s architects that, “For us, the enjoyment of architecture is the sense of weight being borne down or supported, the feeling of moving with the forces of gravity. It’s a very primal need.”

Does anyone arrive in Venice or see the Taj Mahal for the first time and say, ‘Oh, what a wonderful sense of weight being borne down or supported’? And could anything be a primal need, of all things, that is to say a need that precedes all other needs?

Shake your head bitterly by reading this