The Internet, or at any rate my corner of it, is misbehaving just now. I assume that it's the war, and the huge surge of Internet traffic that the war has triggered, and the various rearrangements that have been made in response to this surge.

My long term faith in the Internet as one of the most important things now happening in the world is unshaken, but let's just say that, from where I sit, the thing still has some way to go. Computers are always frustrating when they don't work. This is because when they do work, which let's face it is most of the time, they do miracles.

I spent last weekend in Poland, at a Libertarian Conference in Krakow, and I've already put up three postings (this about Auschwitz, and this and this about Polish education) concerning and deriving from my stay there, in Krakow. And what a lovely city Krakow is by the way, untouched at its jewel of a centre by the Second World War. What happened was that the Russians, smarting from their bad press in connection with how they handled Warsaw, went round, but left a gap for the Germans to escape through. Which the Germans did escape through, despite Hitler's stand-and-die orders. Thus was Krakow saved.

But back to the Internet. Why all of a sudden am I taking it upon myself to expound the obvious, namely that the Internet is very important? Well, having been at that conference, I can now add something.

You know how you spot changes in a place by not living there, but just visiting from time to time. I live in London, but if I want to know what the big changes in the appearance of London are, I ask people who only drop by occasionally, like me visiting Paris (because it's Paris) or Bratislava (where I have friends). Has London got any cleaner lately, or busier, or noisier, or prettier? I ask visiting friends to tell me. I don't know.

I've spoken at plenty of other conferences at various times over the years, but not at an exactly similar one. Well, it's over a decade since I have actually spoken at one of these Libertarian International conferences, apart from the one last autumn in London, which is a different experience and thus doesn't quite count for these purposes. Going to Tallin, or Norway, or Brussels, is not like staying in London and attending one of these conferences, but it is like going to Krakow for one.

And in Krakow it hit me. There I was, talking away about how I wanted libertarians to think, and in particular to think about "culture". And there was this little clutch of young Polish faces staring intently at me, like baby rodents surprised by a nature documentary camera team. And it felt important. It felt like it mattered what I said, and that what I said might count for something, and maybe quite soon. Why? Because the Internet has now empowered people like this. I was no longer placing a long-odds bet that what I was trying to persuade these young people to think about might eventually count for something, when one of them became a professor or a cabinet minister. People like this could immediately, if what I said had any effect, go to their rooms or their internet cafés and register this effect by typing it into their computers, just as I'm typing now.

It was the huge time gap between going to Krakow and going to the previous foreign part that I went to to participate in one of these things that caused me to register this transformation so strongly. Thinking about it, the last of these conferences I journeyed to was in Tallin, in 1991, over a decade ago. The Internet was then but a gleam in the eye of a few Americans, who in any case regarded it as a substitute for good writing rather than a vehicle for it and whom I therefore ignored. As far as I was concerned, the thing did not exist, and thus people like me and like those who typically attend Libertarian International conferences had no direct means of telling the world how we felt and thought about things. Bothering to even talk at such an event was an act of faith, that eventually something would come of it. Now, no such faith is needed.

That sense that any half-intelligent libertarian hack had to have circa 1990, namely that he could well be wasting his time, has gone. I dealt with this fear by simply shutting it out. Others dealt with it by doing something else that made more immediate sense. Now, mouthing off like this does make sense. Just as with that talk I gave in Krakow, you never know who might be listening or what they might make of it, and make of it immediately.

We still might lose, but at least we can go down fighting. The people who show up at those conferences may still be fairly lowly folks, but I no longer fear that any of them are merely people into whom ideas go, there to die. Even the lowliest of them can say things around a dinner table which could show up the next morning in some Internet pronouncement, such as this one. The Internet has blown away the stink of defeat.

I'm not saying that having the run of the New York Times op-ed columns is no better than writing Brian's Culture Blog or Brian's Education Blog, or writing for Samizdata. I know my place in the pecking order and it is a lowly one. But it exists. I have my little attic room in the city, and the key to my own front door. I can enter, sit down, and say what I like. And so can all my friends. We don't have to beg any more.

My team is no more likely to win than ever it was. I and my lowly libertarian friends are empowered, but so are hundreds of millions of others. But thanks to the Internet, I am now part of the conversation. I'm no longer just yelling incoherent noises from the touchline, and hoping against hope that occasionally my voice will be heard above the din. The chasm, to pursue this sporting metaphor, that is fixed between the player and the fan, no longer applies to what I do. I'm kicking things around too.

I've known all this for years, of course. Why else would I have become a blogger? But in Krakow last Sunday I saw these same old facts from an unfamiliar angle and in an unfamiliar place, and they jumped out and bit me. This stuff really is as big as printing. You knew that anyway, I know, but I'm telling you again.

Last night I saw the film Schindler's List for the first time. It was shown on BBC1. Here are some reactions, roughed out immediately after it finished, and then cleaned up today.

For starters, I share the opinion of the Oscar awarding classes. I disagree with their decision to wait until this film before giving Steven Spielberg any Oscars, but not to have smothered this film in Oscars would have been very wrong indeed. And they did, of course.

What I particularly liked about this film is that for once, the immense apparatus of a Hollywood Mega-Production was applied to a task of comparable scale and significance to the scale (but insignificance) of the average Hollywood Mega-Production. It was recording not the adventures of some fantasy hero dressed in a circus costume. (I've just recently also seen Spiderman, and was underwhelmed, although no doubt that's just me.) Rather did Schindler's List record a small something of what the massacre of the Jews in the 1940s looked like and felt like, before all direct memory of these events had died with those who witnessed them. The money was not spent on big stars. It was not even spent on colour film. It was all of it spent communicating something of the scale of the ghastliness involved, and it was spent communicating this ghastliness in all its ghastliness with all the skills that Hollywood possesses.

I've seen as many cheap and perfunctory recreations of the Holocaust as I want to, thank you, with a few absurdly plump actors hurrying quickly into obviously non-gas chambers, their most intimate organs respectfully hidden from us. This time, dozens upon dozens of actors must have spent many days running about stark naked in among other actors dressed in military uniforms, and in the most undignified manner possible, because that's how it originally happened. This nudity – full frontal, private parts routinely revealed for quite long stretches – was, as the Hollywood saying so often goes, entirely justified by the needs of the story being told. Trouble was taken to find some people who looked sufficiently thin when naked. All this must have cost a fortune, or I damn well hope it did. But the Holocaust and its millions of victims deserved the full Mega-Budget treatment just this once, and I salute Steven Spielberg for having contrived this mighty memorial.

The sheer brutality of how the Germans involved behaved also needed to be nailed down on celluloid before all direct memory of that likewise died off. There have of course been books by the lorry load about these horrible events, but very few holocaust films, I think, and none that have been as technically polished and factually convincing as this one.

I wouldn't want to see Hollywood Holocaust epics every three years, and I don't say that Hollywood Mega-Productions should only be Mega-Profound and Mega-Worthy. I'm not saying they should never make Spiderman, etc. And I quite agree, before someone else says it, that Spiderman and the rest of them often also deal with weighty moral issues – "With great power comes great responsibility!" – even as our hero swings through the caverns of New York in a red and blue diving suit. But I'm glad that Hollywood also managed to make Schindler's List.

The film was characteristically Hollywood also in that it had a happy ending, and it was none the worse for that. It found a heroic saviours in the persons of Oscar Schindler and of his bureaucrat sidekick Itzhak Stern, and it found heroic survival in the form of the thousand or so Jews whom Schindler was able to rescue from the jaws of death, by stuffing death's mouth with money instead. The film did this partly because it did indeed all happen, and it did it partly because those are the Hollywood Rules. Schindler's List wouldn't have been nearly such an effective memorial if no one had wanted to see it.

But at the same time Schindler's List was, or so it seemed to me, a more than somewhat bitter reflection on the Hollywood tradition of the happy ending. Before we were allowed to witness our heroic rescues, the horrors were piled on with terrible and of course entirely appropriate savagery.

But then when the melodramatic rescues eventually came, they were as absurdly happy and fortuitous and heroic as the earlier scenes had been absurdly horrible and evil.

First we saw the senior Nazi of Krakow, Amon Goeth, shooting randomly selected Jews with his telescopic sights rifle from the balcony of his newly constructed villa, which was so ludicrously cruel that it could only have been true. And at the end we watched all the Schindler women – the men having already been saved – being taken by train to Auschwitz, and taken naked into what they (and I) assumed in terror to be a gas chamber, only to be given a shower of water, and then absurdly rescued by the absurdly heroic Schindler and taken away, again by train, from Auschwitz and reunited with their menfolk. And that too was so crazy that it also could only have been true. The final scenes of Schindler's List are as melodramatic as all hell, but you feel that Spielberg has earned the right to his melodramas by his unflinching presentation of the earlier horrors, and that we the audience have earned the right to our little pound of Hollywood Happy Ending, to soften all the earlier blows we have been forced and have forced ourselves to witness.

I got the feeling that Spielberg himself may have identified, albeit in a small way, with Schindler himself, in that, like Schindler, Spielberg started his career by making pots of money and honing his skills as a contriver of big events (in his case films), and then he collected together as much of his money and his skills and his friends' skills and as much time as he and they could spare, and threw them all at this film.

Spielberg took some some outrageous artistic risks, such as having a little girl wear a red coat and having some Jewish ceremonial candles at the end also in colour. Risking the wrath of critics with extreme gestures like that takes real nerve. He couldn't have been sure that Schindler's List would be either an artistic and critical success, or a commercial success, and if it had failed on either count Spielberg's career might have been severely damaged. But he went ahead with the film anyway, and made it the way he wanted to make it – without major stars, black and white with a few red bits, mega-budget, "arty" yet by the end shamelessly, not-a-dry-eye-in-the-house over-the-top emotional.

I intend no disrespect to Spielberg when I say that I suspect him of consciously comparing his own relatively mundane circumstances with those of his hero. I do not accuse him of making a vainglorious comparison. Identifying with a hero is what we have heroes for. We all do this. If we don't, we should. Good for Spielberg for following Schindler's example if that is what happened.

And maybe Spielberg is comparable to Schindler in another way. At the end of the film we see Schindler breaking down in tears and berating himself for having chucked away so much money during his life, and for the fact that consequently he could only afford to save as many Jews as he did save. ("That car, that's two more people! Why did I keep it?") I wonder if Spielberg sometimes now lies awake thinking: if only I'd done it better, if only I'd had the money to hire that guy for longer and to reshoot that scene, and had found a way to include that ghastly episode as well without wasting too much time, and … Don't worry Steven, you did your best. You made a great film. The job you set yourself was done. Maybe not perfectly, maybe not Citizen Kane, Gone With The Wind brillilantly, but very well.

I'm very glad I got my TV reception digitised, because this has seriously improved my TV picture quality. Black and white films seem to suffer particularly from a blurry image. Like all great films, and I do believe that this is one, the way it looks is vitally important. All great films look uniquely like themselves, the exact way they needed to look to tell this particular story.

And I'm glad too that I have this little blog – so small as to be hardly more than a private journal – to record a few of my reactions to this film, which, I think, gives the lie to the claim that Hollywood isn't making great films any more. I'm not sure I'd have wanted to parade my humdrum little opinions about these matters in front of the 2,000 (and rising) per day hit rate of Samizdata. The low hit rates that blogs like this one get are usually regretted by their blogmasters, but I think that a low hit rate can have its advantages. You can think things through in relative privacy. You can think aloud, but not very loudly. Had I only had Samizdata to try to write this stuff for, I might not have written it at all. As it is, this little blog will give me and anyone else who cares about me a slightly better record of my safe and dull little life than would have been the case otherwise, just as Schindler and his Schindler Jews and all the other Jews now have their big nod of recognition and remembrance from the global cinema industry.

I missed the first few minutes. If only because of that I'll definitely be on the lookout for the DVD of Schindler's List, but will be hoping not to have to pay too much. I also possess the original novel by Thomas Keneally, and may even read it any month now, now that I will be able better to keep track of who everyone is.

I'm listening to an ancient 1950 recording of The Mikado. Naxos have been reissuing them, and I got it (2 CDs of it) for £3 in the market.

I'm enjoying it very much, for many reasons, including that it enshrines the upper middle class English voice in its definitely previous manifestation to the present one.

Some time during or just after the nineteen sixties, the money earning classes of my country did a voice makeover. They squirted a more or less huge dose of Michael Caine into their previous John Mills not to say Donald Sinden vowels. This new voice has since spread throughout the new suburbs, to create a new, truly middle class English accent. You do it and you aren't a toff, because toffs are so weird and isolated from normal life that they still talk like John Mills used to in 1950 and sometimes even the way Donald Sinden still did in 1990. But you aren't a criminal stroke tramp either. You have GCSEs. Your parents understand what a mortgage is, and so do you.

But where does that leave the John Mills Donald Sinden accent? Well, nowhere, now that even the old toffs are dying out. Donald Sinden has run out of steam and is probably officially dead himself by now, and John Mills, although still alive despite being 110 years old, is enough of an actor to have introduced slight but definite modifications over the years, to have kept him in touch and make him an acceptable chat-show guest. But for us made-over upper-middles it's nice to hear The Voice in all its 1950 embarrassingness given an outing from time to time.

However, and here's my point, we made-over upper-middles do quite agree that The Voice was indeed embarrassing. If we didn't think this we wouldn't have abandoned The Voice (either with a Michael Caine Switch or with a John Mills Modified Makeover - my preferred route) in the sixties. Young pin-striped ginks trying to become Conservative MPs who haven't dumped The Voice, or who even deliberately taught themselves to sound like 1950 John Mills (or even Donald Sinden) are indeed truly embarrassing. You can't talk like that and mean it. I recall listening to an ancient BBC radio production of Hamlet, and the security guards at the beginning sounded like they were driving around in ancient sports cars in the 1950 London to Brighton ancient sports car race. Good god man!, as they would say, or, as their grandchildren would say: Give me a break! They sounded like Boat Race commentators, and may well have been exactly that in later years. What ho, Marcellus! Did you see the jolly old ghost last night? Gosh what an absolutely ripping show! Cringe.

But I do want to be able to listen to The Voice from time to time, for old time's sake, in all its unashamed embarrassingness. But I want to hear it in a setting where self-mockery is built in. Hence the pleasure of listening to The Voice doing The Mikado, rather than Hamlet.

"If you want to know who we are!!!! … We are gentlemen of Japan!!!! …" That generation saying serious stuff with The Voice is too much to bear. Noel Coward explaining in all seriousness why he is fighting the Second World War, dressed as a sea captain. Please. Donald Sinden trying to be even more serious, in The Cruel Sea. That is just too over the top, dear boy, and one simply can't, dear boy, take it seriously. But, dear boy, when one is sending oneself up, conceding with one's every inflection that the British Empire is folding its tents even as we speak in this peculiar way, dear boy, and that this whole way of talking will soon be a thing of the past, dear boy, well, that doesn't date. Or rather, it does date but in a completely satisfactory way, that I at any rate can still now enjoy.

One of the huge changes that has come over History, no less, is that we now have genuine recordings of how people really spoke, from about 1900 onwards. In my recent piece about Hamlet on Samizdata I included the guess that Shakespeare as originally spoken probably sounded more like modern American than modern posh English. Wow, said someone, is that what people really now think? I think they think this, but both halves of that are just guesses, I'm afraid, and I hope to muster the guts to admit it over there some time soon. But what wouldn't we give for a scratchy old gramophone record, like my Mikado CDs, of Shakespeare himself reading one of his bits? A photo would be fantastic. But a sound recording, now I think about it, and if I had to choose, would be even better. The pictures of Shakespeare that we do now have give us a pretty good idea of how he looked, but a recording of the man would cause an earthquake in Shakespeare scholarship and Shakespeare interpretation, and probably in History itself.

"Three little girls from school are we, come from the ladies' seminary …"

Gels, that is, with a elongated short "e": "Ge-e-e-e-e-ls". You know. The Voice. The ladies did it too of course.

"We're very wide ar-wake thar moon end ay."

The moon yes, but not you granny dearest, not any more. You're dead. As is the Queen Mother. But you live on in electro-vinyl, I'm very happy to report.

Last night I put a piece about the Ethan Hawke Hamlet over on Samizdata, because Samizdata needs stuff now that is not about that non-war that has been not-starting lately.

Samizdata has a lot of readers, and a lot of commenters, and there were quite a few comments about Hamlet movies. Branagh is boring. Branagh is great. Hawke is great. Hawke is dreadful. Mel Gibson is not good. And so on. The interesting comments explained why they thought X sucked, or why they thought Y great. The silly ones just said it. Steven Den Beste, for example, who is worshipped by many citizens of the blogosphere, and often does write excellent stuff (about the non-war that has been not-starting) produced one of these oracular gobs of abuse denouncing Hawke, but gave no clue as to what he objected to about the man's performance. I'm not saying these all these folks aren't totally entitled to their contrasting opinions. It's just that "X sucks because I say so" is a rather boring opinion.

Sometimes "X sucks" can be funny. If the usual style in some particular writing venue tends towards high-falutin' over-elaboration, then the occasional unadorned "X sucks" can be a refreshing contrast. But Samizdata is not such a place.

Anyway, given that I haven't been writing about Hamlet movies here when I might have been (but instead put it elsewhere) let me import some fine film criticism by Aaron Haspel from another blog, this time about another favourite movie of mine, 12 Angry Men, starring Henry Fonda.

I shouldn't have done it, I know, but last night I watched 12 Angry Men again on television. Its principal interest is sociological. It preserves in celluloid a representative collection of liberal stereotypes circa 1957 — bloviating bigot Ed Begley, Lonely Crowd adman Robert Webber, hypersensitive slum-dweller Jack Klugman (looking positively fawn-like, if you can believe it), neurotically precise broker E.G. Marshall, short-fused martinet Lee J. Cobb, broad-minded and tolerant architect Henry Fonda. What is it with Hollywood and architects anyway? How come they always get a free pass? Why are there doctor and lawyer jokes in store, but no architect jokes?

Partly it's politics of course. Architecture at that time was becoming heavily left-wing not just in the sense that architects themselves were tending to be heavily left-wing, but in the more profound sense that architecture itself, that stuff they did, was becoming the literal, physical, concrete embodiment of socialist centralism, and a literal physical attack on individual, bourgeois freedom.

But there's more to it than that. Architects do have this ultra cool vibe radiating from them. Did I mention that I once tried to be an architect? Yes I did. Why? Because I wanted to be cool. It wasn’t that I especially loved designing buildings, and I hate the actual process of actually designing buildings – doing all that work I mean. It was simply that when people asked me what I did, I wanted to be able to say: "I'm an architect", and then bask in their inevitable admiration. When I was trying to do it, architecture had a very high drop out rate, and I reckon that's one of the reaons. People like me loved the idea of doing it, but hated actually doing it.

Adds Haspel:

If I ever write a screeplay, I'm going to make my villain an architect, out of sheer perversity.

Nothing perverse about that. It's a good idea.

Haspel then goes on to argue that the accused in 12 Angry Men was actually guilty, despite Henry Fonda persuading the other eleven to acquit him. And the two commenters on the piece so far both agree:

… Kid was guilty as hell.

And this, from Jim Valliant:

Our "hero" Henry Fonda is also guilty of gross juror misconduct. The knife he produced in the jury room was not presented as evidence at trial. The prosecution never had a chance to rebut this new evidence, and the defense (perhaps knowing that the prosecution had the complete statistics on the knife) may have intentionally NOT introduced this defense. Fonda's misconduct was not only illegal and against the judge's specific instructions (which Fonda had presumably sworn to follow), it was very unfair to the prosecution – and the truth.

I like that.

… And talking about blogging-about-blogging - see immediately below - I am aware that the aesthetic appearance of this blog is a shambles, as is that of my other one. This is a particular embarrassment when you consider that design is one of the things I'm most interested in writing about here. I am sorely tempted to just write out a big cheque to Sekimori, who did the Samizdata redesign when it moved to MT, and have them fix everything up looking pretty. But a lot of work would be involved in telling Sekimori what exactly I wanted, because I don't yet know that properly.

I use Movable Type simply because Samizdata does, and that's how I got started with blogging. So what I want is an MT geek who lives in London who can sit down alongside me at my computer and sort it all out with me. That way, I can work it out as we go along.

(By the way, this is the sort of reason why work will never be done entirely in people's separate homes or offices by the seaside. The very thing, new technology, which is supposed to be the means of making all work into work-at-a-distance is one of the biggest reasons why we will still want a lot of our work not to be work-at-a-distance. Making technology work better, in new and at first unfamiliar waqys, is what modern work is now, pretty much. And you can't do that without regular hands-on meetings.)

Anyway, how would this magical non-worker-at-a-distance be paid? Well, ideally, he would be so pathetically grateful for all the gratitude I would pour all over him – here, at my education blog, and at Samizdata (which has a hit rate of about 2,000 per day and rising) – that he'd be willing to pay for the privilege of helping me, and displaying his logo on my blogs. (He's the kind of person who knows how to display logos.) But I realise that this may be too much to ask, so I would certainly be willing to talk money of the sort that would flow in his direction. About the same amount in total as Sekimori would cost - a couple of hundred quid? - but with extra face-to-face service added.

I already know people who can do this kind of thing for me. And they do, occasionally. But they are too busy doing other things, like earning a living, blogging for themselves, or disappearing for long periods to non-London places, which is no good at all. I need someone who lives in or near London and who can be summoned at a few days notice. I need someone who needs to get out more, not someone who already does get out.

Here is something that might encourage such a blogeek to present himself to me. I don't want to spill any secrets here, but let me just say that I have intelligent friends who are now talking around the matter of how to make proper money out of blogging. So, target blogeek, think of helping me - for some money but not for much - as a career move.

If you want to know what my attitude is to posting things here on Brian's Culture Blog, then have a read of this piece by the now rested Rachel Lucas. Her attitude to what to post and when to post is pretty much mine, although days with five rants will be rare here. The equivalent in my case seems now to be very long meandering pieces with very long meandering titles – three proper postings in one, you could say.

Rachel Lucas is particularly good on the "silent reader" phenomenon. The Silent Reader reads, doesn't comment, doesn't email, probably doesn't have his or her own blog, but just has a chuckle or a think, and then gets on with regular life. The (non- because now I'm telling you) secret of blogging, I'm convinced, is to have an imaginary Silent Reader for whom you write, and not to be put off by commenters who to begin with may not be at all what you have in mind. Then what happens is that Silent Readers do in due course assemble who are just like your imaginary Silent Reader, only for real.

A few days or weeks ago, I promised myself that I would ease off on the blogging-about-blogging stuff here, and concentrate on Art, Architecture, Music, etc. Blogging is part of culture, and this is supposed to be my most self-indulgent and anti-anal-retentive blog operation, but I didn't want blogging-about-blogging to get out of control.

But then Adam Reed, an academic who is going around interviewing bloggers, got in touch again, and we had another conversation in which he focussed especially on the exact sort of stuff that I'd been promising myself to write less of. So there you go. As Rachel Lucas says, just put what you want, and people who are interested in that will be interested. That way you'll be content, and will keep going contentedly.

None of the above applies to my Education Blog, where the rule of me having to put something up every week day is working out, so far, really rather well. A little something every day fits in well with education, I find. (That is how to teach maths to children, for example.) My Silent Reader over there likes this rule also.

When I was hardly more than a child, I tried, very half-heartedly, to become an architect, and I drank in the ideology of the Modern Movement in Architecture, like some idiot who had joined a religious cult. The cult spat me out, although not because I lacked belief - I just couldn't do the drawings. And, a few years older and distinctly wiser if not wise exactly, I resumed the attempt that is still in progress at my version of a normal life. I never really liked what passed for modern architecture at the time in my life when I was trying to learn how to add to the problem. But I did suffer a bad case of false consciousness on the subject. I thought I did.

And I wouldn't have missed this experience for anything. It really is very special to have lived through one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary delusions from the inside, in the grip of the thing. I acquired a knowledge that is denied to normal people of this bizarre moment in human history. Normal people wonder what the hell those insane architects were thinking of when they built all those crazy housing estates and office blocks. Normal people were baffled that architects who prated endlessly about "form following function" seemed uniquely incapable of making a building that did actually function properly. What in the blazes was going on? Well, I am in a position to tell you quite a lot of the answers.

By the early to mid seventies I was thoroughly cured of my Modernistic architectural delusions, and like any other normal person I spent the next decade walking past scaffolding, shuddering, and asking myself in despair: What ghastly atrocity are they going to put here?

But then, it happened. I can't remember exactly when it was. Early nineteen eighties I think. Anyway, one day, I was walking past a London building site, and I heard myself say, not: "What the hell are they going to put here?", but rather: "Ooh, a building site, I wonder what they're going to put here!" And I knew at once that this was not a feeling that I was forcing myself to have. This was the real thing. I now genuinely liked modern architecture!

Modern architecture, from about the mid-seventies onwards, has, in London, been getting better and better. Expect many more postings here explaining why this is so, and I hope, further pictorial proofs.

For more of my opinions on all this, see this piece in Free Life, about skyscrapers, Ayn Rand, the Word Trade Centre, and related matters. By the way, I've changed my mind about the World Trade Centre and what they ought now to put there. I now think it should be a "political skyscraper".

Yes, a great new London building. My heading does not lie. And it's nearing completion. These things are a matter of taste, I know. Different steeples for different peoples, and so on and so forth. But I love it.

The new Swiss Re ("Re" stands for reinsurance) building, otherwise known as 30 Saint Mary Axe, is a five hundred foot tower shaped, we Londoners are fond of saying, like a gherkin. To be more polite, it looks like an elegant, carefully tended coniferous tree, or maybe a big christmas light bulb. Or maybe a bulb of the vegetable sort, for it looks as if it has indeed sprung up, rather than merely been constructed.

Last week I took a few pictures of it, and here they are. Do what you like with them so long as your lawyers don't turn around and tell me that they aren't mine any more.

The usual "story" of architecture these days is that unrepentant modernists like Sir Norman Foster, the designer of this new tower, are at one end of the spectrum, while at the other end are to found the practitioners of neo-classical revivalism. But what I find interesting is how much both ends of this spectrum have in common, underneath their mutual loathing and feuding.

Both believe in a building being beautiful and stylish. Both want us regular people to say "wow I do like that" when we first set eyes on one of their efforts. And they both want their buildings to fit in well with the buildings or landscapes around them. They merely quarrel a little about how to do these kinds of things.

Does fitting in mean harking back to the styles of the past and the styles of nearby buildings, or does it mean placing an unrepentantly modern building next to older ones, with each setting the other off, and emphasising each other's particular style and nature? Does beauty mean embracing and celebrating the latest technology, or keeping it at arms length? The answers vary, but these are now the questions.

When the Modern Movement in Architecture first peaked in the nineteen sixties, the buildings were not trying to be beautiful or to fit in, and they most certainly were not trying to be "stylish" – certainly not in London. Modernism was not a "style" – a word that your True Modernists could never use without a sneer. Modernism was no mere celebration of the superficial. It was a total rejection of the past not just in the form of its styles, but in the form of a serious intention to destroy the actual buildings of the past! (It's hard to believe, but that really was the idea.) Modern buildings weren't there to nod politely at their surroundings, to make a nice stir and a nice contribution to an already much loved landscape, or to turn an ordinary landscape into a loveable one. Modern buildings were going to rebuild the entire world in their own brutally honest image, with no polite nods, and with the uncompromising honesty of a panzer regiment. Modernism no more accommodated itself to or contributed to the pre-existing architectural setting than a total political revolution nods politely towards existing power structures and worries about how to fit in with them.

There was no theoretical limit to size and scope of a Sixties Modern Movement building. The edge of the site was not a true boundary; it was a mere cease-fire line, a temporary dotted line on a campaign map. A "building" was not a single shape; it was a plan that was in principle infinitely extendable, like a repeating wallpaper or textile pattern.

Sixties Modernism made a point of exposing the structure, and making the surface of the building totally transparent. How should a building look? It should look how it was! It should proclaim its internal structure to the world. Sixties Modernism rejoiced in totally transparent glass, for it wanted the barrier between the interior and the exterior to be as invisible and insignificant as possible.

Yet the economic logic of modern technology (never mind the demands of aesthetics) says that it is far easier to build a structure in accordance with structural logic, and then cover it up with a surface that protects that structure and which protects the internal environment which teh structure supports and which is its purpose, and which, as a separate project, also looks nice. To regard the outer skin of the building as no more than an interruption to "honesty" caused by those silly clients not wanting not to be exposed to the elements is to ask for environmental and for aesthetic disaster.

The outer glass skin of 30 Saint Mary Axe is a decorative feature, as is the diagonal-based structure which supports it, with the twirls on the surface of the building now having been adopted as the logo of the building. Sixties Modernists must be twirling in their rotting concrete graves.

My only worry about this, I now believe, wonderful building is that when the cranes have gone, it may lose something of its present charm. There is now something outer-space-like and science-fictional to the way in which the determinedly utilitarian cranes now minister to the vast other-worldly pod, like worker insects serving their queen, or like space engineers maintaining a visiting spaceship. When the cranes are gone, will the thing look rather – I scarcely dare to ask this but I must – dull?

I'll keep you posted.

More from February 2003