Having studied the picture of San Gimignano in Italy, with its cluster of towers (The Argus, August 21), I cannot for the life of me see its relevance to Brighton and Hove.

The Italian towers fit in well with the medieval town from which they emerge and their effect is pleasing.

Now stand on the Palace Pier and look at our own cityscape. What do you see?

A number of excessively ugly recent towers protruding above the magnificent human-scale Regency panorama.

Every one of them is anomalous and a blight on its surroundings. Towers are the worst mistake our planners have made. We do not need more.

It is typical of current architects to use gimmicks to try to sell their designs.

Just as modern artworks are often so imaginatively feeble that they have to have interpretative screeds appended to them, so modern architects feel the need to append extra-architectural explanations for their whimsies.

Frank Gehry likens his metallic skyscrapers to a Victorian woman's dress.

"We are trying to pull off the finesse of the Victorian ladies," he blathers (The Argus, March 9).

Piers Gough likens his proposed Preston Road block to bow-fronted Regency terraces and its colour to that of seafront railings (The Argus, March 15), even though it is not a terrace nor on the seafront.

And now his North Laine Banana Block is compared to San Gimignano, a place without any cultural connections with Brighton, and its striped effect to that of a deckchair.

Why should a block of flats look like a deckchair?

These half-baked analogies are put up as a smokescreen to try to make crude designs sound culturally acceptable.

In fact, what we have in this ongoing series of proposals is a case of good old Male Dog Syndrome.

This small clique of gimmicky, fame-obsessed architects has only one real ambition; to leave their territorial stinks all over our city.

Their plans should be treated with the contempt they deserve.

-Graham Chainey, Brighton