It acknowledges that traditional house building is better than modern day house building and sets out methods of improving modern housing so that it blends with the landscape, improving the environment rather than spoiling it.
The context is 2025 in the UK where most people are in favour of all things green yet there seems to be a dearth of Good Green Policies, they focus on things like carbon footprints, U-values and bicycle lanes at the same time a scarring the landscape with ugly, totally dependent on fossil fuel, buildings. The focus on air quality improvement needs to move more towards improving the quality of the volume house builders buildings that are currently spreading like a cancer across the Country.
The political take of the Muse is that over the last 100 years the International has become increasingly dominant over the Local. In architecture we see this in the dominance of modern, international architecture over traditional, classical, local, vernacular architecture.
The Muse points out that the International Modern Style uses the same materials and methods everywhere. It is built using steel, concrete, glass, asphalt and machines powered by fossil fuels whereas traditional building uses local stone, local aggregates, local timber and traditional building skills.
It is no wonder that people flock to Venice, Dubrovnik, Kyoto and the Cotswolds. The traditional buildings are more beautiful, they are made from natural stone, they have ambiance whereas modern urban environments are often ugly, oppressive and stress inducing.
Obviously there is some kind of appeal to Modernism and the scale of modern building developments in cities can be awe inspiring. However, somewhere in between the extremes of the skyscraper and the country cottage, there is the place where we live, our home, the place where our children live and that is what the Architectural Muse wants to improve.
The next section will lay out the ground rules of The Book of Building the first axiom of which is: BUILD USING LOCAL STONE.