I'M INTERESTED in getting people to think about what makes an attractive building and what makes an ugly one. There has been a loss of ambition when it comes to beautiful architecture. I think we've just given up. There's de"nitely a sense that making beautiful parts of town was something people did in the 18th or 19th century but that it's not something we can do nowadays. We can house people and make things look clean but we can't necessarily make things look beautiful. But why not? If we could do it 100 years ago why can't we do it now?

Firstly, there's an underlying feeling that what's beautiful is entirely subjective. There's a feeling that you can't generalise about what's attractive and there's a fear that to do so might be snobbish.

But I think that there are generalisations you can make. For example, if you look at where people choose to go on holiday it will tell you a lot about what people think is attractive. Very few people go to Frankfurt whereas quite a lot of people go to Amsterdam. So this idea that no-one knows what's beautiful doesn't really add up.

The problem generally is that people are reluctant to express their opinions when it isn't backed up by a qualification. I think that that's quite dangerous because experts aren't always right. Of all the art forms, architecture is one of the least studied. You're likely to learn a little bit about literature at school, a little bit about art, but you're probably not going to be taught anything about architecture, even though that's the art-form that surrounds us most of the time.

That leads people to be unnecessarily insecure about their tastes.

And because people aren't expressing their views, architecture has fallen for a cult of novelty, which it has borrowed from the other arts.

In fact the most successful forms of architecture are very repetitive.

Classical architecture and Georgian architecture were all about repetition. The streets of Paris and New York are all about repetition.

Yet there's this idea nowadays that architects can only make their name by being peculiar. So as a result contemporary architecture is often either a novelty or it's bland, and the idea of ordinary good quality housing and buildings is under threat.

This shouldn't be at the more trivial end of our concerns. It's part of our health and well being in the broadest sense. A building has an impact on anyone who sees it. Architecture has as much of an impact on us as the weather. I think a lot of the time our moods are hovering between different possibilities and it's frequently things like the quality of the architecture that will settle whether we can move in a positive direction or a negative direction.

So we need to take more of an interest in the architecture we live in and the architecture around us. At the moment all these things are essentially decided by property developers taking politicians out for lunch and that's how the wheels are greased. It's all decided by lobbying. You can't blame businesses for doing that. It's their job to find the shortest way to the largest sum of money. It's for the rest of society to decide what we want and to take action. We need to put the structures and hurdles in place to get the architecture we want.

But the first step is deciding what we want.