To be honest, I think the above drawing demonstrates how much architecture has changed in the past 20 years. In the 80s and 90s a lot of architecture reflected a more human and appropriate scale and style, as a reaction to the horrors of the 60s and 70s, and often reflected what normal people and communities preferred. A good example is the Victoria Centre, which replaced that awful concrete bunker and which most people still think looks nice and in-keeping with the Victorian street scene. However, a building like that would be almost banned and ridiculed now by architects and planning officials as pastiche and not reflecting modern trends. Look also at the difference between the Aberconwy Centre of 1980 or so and the arena that was pretty nastily bolted onto half its frontage around 2008/9 (? date).
That's also how we developed from the pavilion redesign of the early 2000s above to what we saw proposed in the early stages of the pavilion apartments scheme - third rate architects more conscious of their own 'legacy' than the wishes of local people, egged on by local planning officials who decry 'pastiche' architecture. Even the Design Commission for Wales disliked the apartments' final design as pretty ungainly. I appreciate that people want to make money and business is business, but why don't they just build beautiful places that people want to see, or that people want to live in, rather than building 'iconic' designs to show off how 'progressive' they are, that will only date badly within 5 years' time.
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