Keith Jeffries

The Tide of Minimalism

The Tide of Minimalism

 

Minimalism has arrived with a hateful vengeance.

A fashion and world view to desecrate the past.

To replace the Gothic and Norman arches of our churches.

With blocks of concrete and granite to suit modernity.

The magnificent and majestic has sold itself down the river of time.

To the bland, expressionless squares and rectangles of a new age.

Stained glass windows, intricate vesture and a love of colour have gone.

In its place we are gifted with the shapeless and the drab.

Cathedrals and palaces of great architecture and glory.

Replaced by the squat, unimaginative and the bland.

Victorian railway stations and monuments to hail our progress.

Neo classical town halls and public buildings of splendour.

We now exhibit sheets of rectangular glass and metal frames.

We have thrown beauty away as being too extravagant.

Despite its eternal ability to last and endure.

They cry that the structures of old were too costly to build and maintain.

A new vibrant dynamism has arrived with the name minimalism.

It now disfigures the landscape and dulls the eyes.

A church built of concrete with no windows, no light.

Hardly a place for a coronation or a wedding to take place.

Churches and public buildings now resemble the ordinary and the mundane.

Minimalism and modernity march hand in hand.

To the drum of abandonment to transform our beloved land.