Why am I showing you a slide of a North American Indian? Well, I'm an architect, I've been practising for 20 odd years now, since the school of architecture, and what has become increasingly clear to me is that I feel the duty not just to design prime forms in the sunlight but above all to ensure that those prime forms have a real meaning and are not just sculptural or technological. And the meaning they must have is their relevance to the people that will be using them. And in order to understand the way in which architecture can be created in a very different way, which is commonly being called 'community architecture', or the 'community architecture approach', it's very important to remember that all of us are capable of being entirely self-sufficient. We don't actually need buildings. The Indians can survive in North America, the Eskimos can survive in sub-zero temperatures, and the Bushmen of the Kalahari can survive under the blazing sun in the desert. We don't actually need people to design for us.

If we jump now to the 20th century: just outside Liverpool an elderly pensioner died of hypothermia in the cold winter last year. Her house is within a few hundred yards of the cooling towers that pump enough heat into the atmosphere to' actually keep all the houses in Britain warm every day of the year for nothing. The power station is centrally-controlled; it is intended to create energy for the use of people in this country. Not only does it fail to do that in many respects but it also destroys the salmon and the trout in the rivers through acid rain. So here is a very good example of the built environment, the mechanics that control the built environment, ultimately destroying the planet we live on.