The decision to build the London Centre for Music less than 300 metres away from an existing concert hall is the latest unnecessary example of global high-culture one-upmanship, says Phineas Harper.

It has been 60 years since Welsh theorist and critic Raymond Williams wrote that "culture is ordinary". Williams, who had grown up in foothills of the Black Mountains, argued against the divisive class-based idea championed by the poet TS Eliot and others that there is high culture, enjoyed by the educated elite, and low culture for the rest.
"An interest in learning or the arts" Williams wrote, "is simple, pleasant and natural".
Williams' arguments were influential, helping to dismantle snobbery in the arts and open up a sustained period of opportunities and appreciation for a far wider pool of culture-makers of all stripes. Yet take a look at the plans for London's new 15-storey concert hall proposed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) and other glitzy palaces for the performance of classical music around Europe, and it is as if we have stepped back into divided culture wars of the 1950s that Williams railed against. The DS+R design is a towering pyramid with a huge new orchestral auditorium at its base and another venue at its apex. Requiring the demolition of the former Museum of London and a 21-storey office tower, the building resembles a reconfigured version of DS+R's 2016 Columbia University medical centre with a complex route of ascending...