The Ashes 2013/14: as the Adelaide Oval falls by the wayside, the bell tolls for iconic stadiums But of late, the custodians of South Australia's most precious cricketing citadel have signally failed to honour the Ruskinian maxim that "when we build, let us think that we build forever." While the Oval's original purpose was to produce an intimate yet iconic monument to the game, we awake on Thursday morning to discover the Adelaide cricket-scape sadly denuded of its provincial charm and reimagined as a canopied, corporatised monolith fit for next year's Rolling Stones concert. The £300 million lavished on the redesign is a godsend for those who like steepling skyboxes, but it has led to the desecration of certain beloved distinctions. We should be grateful, perhaps, that Kenneth Milne's Edwardian scoreboard - upon which the death of Sir Donald Bradman, forever synonymous with his hometown of Adelaide, was so poignantly recorded 12 years ago - has been preserved, and that the famous grassy mound, created in 1898 with earth excavated from the banks of the River Torrens, likewise remains intact. And yet, if you seek the reassuring sight of the twin spires of St Peter's Cathedral, still jutting above the skyline as strikingly as ever, you will find them sadly eclipsed behind the hulking, half-finished Eastern Stand. The ground's former red-roofed elegance used to be an expression of the city's stolidly conservative nature. Now its many detractors claim that the remodelled version looks, from the air, like a giant toilet seat. A Test match in Adelaide retains, especially in an Ashes series as simmering as this, a cherished status on a par with tour stops at Lord's or Bridgetown's Kensington Oval. In the words of Justin Langer, "it is embraced by the whole of South Australia," with crowds in the thousands not unusual even at nets sessions. But its popularity has resided also in the iconography of the venue, from the suburban ambience of its "village green" to the evergreen splendour of the Moreton Bay fig trees. Architects who have chosen to swamp these attributes with hugely engorged seating areas do so at their peril. Progress at the expense of heritage is sometimes not worth the cost. So often in sport, a stadium owes its cachet to its idiosyncrasy. Few would dispute that The Dell in Southampton - built, in the words of one local historian, upon a "gurgling stream and lofty aspens" - possessed a good deal more allure than the cuboid Cornflakes box that is St Mary's Stadium. Similarly, the pavilion that distinguished Bramall Lane during its dual-use days has become conspicuous by its absence. Alas, those who construct our sporting edifices appear today to be wedded less to the notion of endearing peculiarity than to that of slavish homogeneity. The exceptions can alienate, too. Many at the last World Cup in South Africa deemed Johannesburg's Soccer City to be nothing more than a colossal Technicolor cooking pot, although the Rainbow Nation symbolism was noble in intent. Wembley, by contrast, could be aping any number of America's gridiron enormo-domes - only with a rather fetching arch attached. The patch of real estate that has perhaps encapsulated this switch to a soulless, Starship Enterprise school of design is London N5, where a sizeable slice of Arsenal season-ticket holders continue to lament the supplanting of Highbury's cosiness with the Emirates" curious feeling of detachment. Ruskin would have put the draftsmen straight. For it was he who held that the abiding principle of architecture should be to build "not for present use alone, but for men to look upon the labour and wrought substance and say, "See, this our fathers did for us."" Set against those standards, the supposed grandeur of Adelaide's new-look Oval seems distinctly ephemeral.