Oldness and prettiness are bound up together

A modern building can certainly be striking and intriguing, whether a new skyscraper or the Basílica de la Sagrada Família. But [i]pretty[/i]?

I was lucky enough to spend 3 years of my life here (indeed a dormer window into my second-year bedroom is just visible top-left!). Not that striking. Not, as such things go in that city, all that unusual. But its prettiness is inherently bound up in its age, dating from around 1480.

A master-mason - today we'd call him an architect - designed the original buildings here (the attic windows, the crenelations, and the statue in the niche above the large tower-room window, are later), but whoever he was, he wasn't interested in advertising his name to the world, merely to do a good job, further secure his reputation, and move on to whatever his next commission might be, continuing to earn his honest living.

That's not what big-name architects of today are after. When the design of your building, the completion of your commission, is about [i]fame[/i], about [i]awards[/i], about [i]revolutionary ideas[/i], something wonderful in the organic nature of traditional architecture is lost. Architecture with awards, funded more by money than by common sense, is, fair enough, inherently not old, but nor is it remotely pretty.

I said, that the the tower id [i]not that striking[/i], but the other side of this tower, facing the street, was in 1646 indeed stuck - by a cannonball! - during a siege in the English Civil War (the ball, much polished by the hands of generations of students, remains in the library to this day).

And it's the fact that with age come absurd parochial anecdotes like that, that old buildings are always pretty.

Perhaps, in 550 years', the Burj Khalifa will carry the same beautiful weight of history.

But somehow, even if it's still standing, I doubt it.