Once upon a time, when most people in rural Ireland were poor, Irishhouses were lovely to look at. They were horrible to live in, which iswhy when EU subsidies kicked in, everyone who lived in a whitewashedgrass-roofed cottage, with a dungheap steaming before the door, knockedit down and built himself a hideous villa. Where the old cottage hadbeen almost windowless and dark, what with the smoke of the peat-firepainting the interior brown as it curled its slow way through thethatch, the new villas had lots of glazing, doors, windows, porches andconservatories, and acres of hardstand. Because over the years he hadgrown sick of wading through mud and manure, the owner concreted allround the grand new house, and threw up balustrades and gate-posts inall directions.

In Italy, the peasants couldn`t wait to move outof their beautiful case coloniche and into the nasty new case popolariin the suburbs of the neighbouring towns. If they were ever aware oftheir damp stone houses with their heavy chestnut beams and terracottafloors as beautiful, they dumped beauty for comfort and convenience,and sold their old houses to fools like me who struggled for years tostop them falling down.

At the same time, amid the sprawlingmedieval granges of agrarian Benelux, a new kind of ditsy villa waspopping up. First of all a hole was dug, to house the bunker that wouldserve as foundation and garage. A two-storey house with villageydetails was built on top of the bunker and the spoil from theexcavation banked up around it, so that the house seemed to bepirouetting on its own little knoll. The coy way the family car was tobe hidden from sight is part and parcel of the fake villagery thatmuddies the thinking of domestic architects all over Europe. In theworst cases it extends to fake stone, fake brick and fake tiles. Windowframes and doors are no longer made of wood, but they are still styledas if they were.

Vernacular building had the advantage that ithad to be done with locally available materials, which pretty muchguaranteed that it would harmonise with the landscape. Windows wereusually few and small, because the houses were empty most of the day,so heat was conserved in the most obvious way, by thick walls with fewperforations. People who work outside don`t need to enjoy the view whenthey are inside. As the proportion of people working on the landdeclined, and more people spent more and more time indoors, houses cameto be built with more and bigger windows, as well as growing extrarooms. The simple cubic forms that used to nestle in the landscape gaveway to buildings that stood on tiptoe and peered about them with glassyeyes - even when the new houses were built so close together that therewas nothing to see, and the picture windows were most often draped andblinded to preserve privacy.

In English towns and cities,apartment living never caught on; instead of putting single-storeydwellings one on top of another, cliffs of house consisting of pairs ofrooms connected by stairs were stuck on both sides to others.Gradually, as the suburbs grew outwards, the terraces decayed to merestumps of themselves and became that endless architectural conundrum,the semi-detached house.

Houses grew uglier as the proportionof architects in the population and their share of the new-build budgetgrew. New houses are now universally horrible, and eco-houses are themost horrible of the lot. The builders of eco-houses accept as a giventhe basic shape and dropsical proportions of the two-storey suburbanvilla, with pitched roofs, end gables, front porch, picture windows,chimneys, and so forth. This may be because local planning authoritiesdemand that they be "in keeping", even though there is little aestheticmerit in what they are expected to be in keeping with. There is usuallynothing about the eco-house to signal that it is a new kind
www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/jul/28/architecture.ecotowns?gusrc=rss&feed=environment