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It was about 20 or 25 years ago that it became de rigueur for strangers to address you by your Christian name (or given name as it was just beginning to be called). This appelative idiom spread fast, and into the most improbable areas. Even the army, for God’s sake: an officer who had begun his career in 1970 as, say, Second Lieutenant Richard Head would, by the time he reached field rank, be addressed by subordinates not as Sir or Major Head, Sir, but as Major Dick, Sir or Major Dick. Not only Christian names but abbreviations.

This is merely one example of the mandatory informality that now characterises British life: open-necked onehelluvaguy tycoons, eager-to-please telly louts, vacuously grinning politicians who are spendthrift with what little dignity they possess and who will stoop to anything for a photo opportunity, an all-over ambience of sincerely caring ingratiation and niceness that is as cosy as a quilt and every bit as cerebrally demanding.

The stereotype of the stiff upper lip, of uncomplaining stoicism, of grace under pressure was, no doubt, a caricature, but it was unquestionably founded in the actuality of emotional continence. The stereotype of the New Brit as a sociopathic cripple and bullying sentimentalist is, again, a caricature, this time with a basis in observation of such phenomena as the national outpourings occasioned by the deaths of the People’s Princess and Jill Dando, the Animal Liberation Front and the government’s meaningless apologies for the alleged wrongs of its predecessors.

The eschewal of formality is, of course, a con.

It deludes the gullible into believing that the very idea of rank and position has somehow dissipated, that hierarchy is something that evaporated along with, oh, collars and ties, or received pronunciation, or the mandarin class in public life. But these will be reversed at some stage in fashion’s cycle. We will, however, still be left with a store of buildings whose fabric and structure incorporate anti-hierarchicism – maybe wittingly, maybe not. I offer the option of maybe not because of the architectural trade’s predilection for copying mannerisms without the least notion of what prompted them in the first instance: the 95% of sheep who never think to do other than copy the goats.

Humans require space in which – no, not to grow, but to pursue their secret, grubby, imperfect lives

I mean, could the Lowry have existed without the example of Gehry in Bilbao? The matter of whether or not to outwardly express the hierarchy of a building’s parts is not a modern dilemma. It existed long before Pugin made such a fetish of it. At Salisbury Cathedral, the disparate bits reveal themselves.

At the precisely contemporary Amiens Cathedral, they are incorporated in a single unifying structure. Nonetheless the building is legible. The modern movement, and, by extension, all those who have so enthusiastically exhumed it over the past decade, was ever beset by the aspirations of revealing both function and structure. These rather tend to get in each other’s way. How does a rectilinear, curtain-walled block that is a history faculty distinguish itself from its structurally candid sibling that is, say, the department of statistical sciences? It doesn’t. There are few building types that pronounce their function: oast houses, maybe – but then they are all domestic dwellings now. See the problem: function will change with time’s passing. Structure won’t.

The admission of a hierarchy’s existence – any hierarchy’s – is a contemporary embarrassment. This is deafeningly evident in the tyranny of the open-plan office, which is among the most inefficient dispositions of space yet devised by humankind, devised of course in a spirit of cosmetic egalitarianism. It is more subtly evident in the commonplace genus of (usually sub-Foster) building that boasts about transparency and speaks the language of inclusiveness and soothes with its unforbidding demeanour and, well, cares, cares very deeply. The only trouble is that it is so open and big-hearted that it requires a regiment of the friends of Reggie and Ronnie, bless ‘em, to prevent Joe Public from wandering in to test the strength of the commitment to openness.