I have now had a chance to read Moneo’s lecture in its elegant, printed form and to confirm what I had half realised:  that Moneo compares the contemporary loss of faith and belief in the tenets on the Modern Movement and the move away from the Vitruvian concepts of firmitas, utilitas and venustas to a belief in technological suprematism alone (or anything goes) is paralleled by Soane’s situation at the end of his life:  ‘It is a situation not very different to that of Sir John Soane, when, at the end of his life, from his house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, he could see that the architectural canon and the language of Classicism were no longer valid and that the new world of architecture was something he wouldn’t recognise’.