Roger Pegrum, who was the Australian Government Architect from 1986-88, says he despairs when he sees what Canberra’s skyline is becoming.

But it’s not the sight of tall buildings that worries him - it’s the fact that they’re all the same height, with a distinct lack of variety in styles and dimensions.

“Come down Fairbairn Avenue and look at Civic - it's the most boring skyline ever,” he says.

“I have great hopes for the town - I don't think it's on its last legs or anything like that, but we are in a nadir at the moment and we've got to come out of it.”

Pegrum has recently published a book about his own life and work as an architect and planner, which ends with a rallying cry for the territory plan to be reimagined.

“Canberra deserves town planners who dream out loud,” he writes.

“The territory plan should be reimagined, with the bar raised considerably higher than at present, and a firm hand is needed to reject plans to drop buildings the size of battleships into residential streets.”

From the outside, Roger Pegrum’s own house could well be a classic inner-northern Canberra duplex.

It is tall and nestled back from the street, and built from what look to be the red bricks so familiar in this quiet street in Reid.

In fact, Pegrum, who has created some of Canberra's most admired houses and public buildings, designed the house himself, and built it from the ground up 12 years ago. With the multiple children from his blended family long grown, he now shares it with his wife Annabelle Pegrum, a fellow architect and former head of the National Capital Authority.

The bricks, he says, were chosen to echo the classic houses around him, the metal window frames selected to blend in with the conventional timber frames on other homes nearby.

The house, in other words, is bespoke but designed to blend in, to be in harmony with its surrounding environment.

How very considerate, is the first thing that comes to mind.

In fact, says Pegrum, consideration, or lack thereof, is a topic that’s been preoccupying him of late, as he drives around Canberra taking in the morphing skyline, or trying to visualise what our future “gateway” will involve along Northbourne Avenue.

It isn’t, he says, the same Canberra he arrived at in 1948, having spent the first 10 years of his life in Singapore where his father was posted.

“I remember standing on Mount Ainslie and being told that there would one day be a great city laid out below me,” he says.

“We were just kids, we got on with our lives and didn’t spend too much time wondering when this great city would arrive and what it would be like when it did. Canberra in 1948 had been occupied for not much more than 20 years, but it had everything to please and intrigue a young boy.”

We’re sitting in the graceful, upper-floor kitchen of the Reid house, with Pegrum’s new book spread before us. It’s one of several; his 1983 book The Bush Capital is credited - incorrectly, it turns out - with coining the term that has come to define Canberra. In fact, the phrase was borrowed from history, as is the case with the title of his new book, A Very Great City One Day. It’s a riff on an early quote from the descendant of an American president, writing to a friend about Washington DC.

Pegrum’s book is also something of a love letter to the city he has returned to several times and eventually made his home, as well as a call for Canberra to find its way back to those days of early promise.

He has been in and out of Canberra several times throughout his career; after finishing school, he went to Sydney to study architecture, and returned as an apprentice in what was then the Department of Works.

One of his earliest jobs was to design a visitor’s centre for Tidbinbilla Nature Park, which was duly built.

“It was very spooky - I was 22 or something,” he says.

He went on design schools in Garran, Mawson and Hughes, as well as the light fittings along Anzac Parade. It was the early days of what would be an illustrious career; while the Tidbinbilla centre would unfortunately be destroyed during the 2003 bushfires, Pegrum has spent many years in private practice, working on countless private and commercial projects throughout the city.

One of his most significant public buildings is, paradoxically, one that hardly anyone gets to see - the Chancery at Government House, for which he won a competition and of which he is still proud. And the smattering of houses he created around the city - notably in Mawson, Aranda and Farrer, are considered prime examples of classic Canberra architecture.

He has never gone in for tall buildings, at least from a practical perspective.

“Nobody's asked me and I don't think I'd get much joy out of it anyway,” he says, although he has no problem with apartments and urban density per se. It’s the lack of thought - for quality of life, and for the future - that gives him pause.

“The thing is that if you look at the buildings that were here when I was a kid, and for some time after, they were often quite carefully placed,” he says - the War Memorial, on the base of Mount Ainslie; University House in the curve of Balmain Crescent.

“What's happening now is that there isn't the same care, it seems to me, about where things are put. I don't know that anybody's really got a vision, there's no real plan anymore.

“And then on top of that, as primarily an architect, is that in terms of the buildings, we're just going through one of those low points.”

He knows of what he speaks; he has a master's in town planning, and sees it as a necessity for most things in life.

“I decry or question anything that's built or planned that doesn't look as if it's been thought through, or considered adequately,” he says.

“I like imagination. If the imagination is crazy, it will get knocked down before it becomes annoying, but better to have a bright idea than not to have an idea at all. Or to just keep on doing what you're doing, because it's cheap or easy.”

In terms of potential, Canberra is in much the same place as it was 70 years ago, when the mighty trees that line the streets were saplings and great buildings mostly in the dreaming stage. The city is nowhere near complete - an adolescent with growing pains, in the first stages of renewal as early-stage houses are knocked down to make way for new ideas.

“Every time you drive round Canberra, you think 'we've got so much land, we can do anything we like', but we've got to make sure it's not the wrong thing,” he says.

“We are in the middle of nowhere, [for] all intents and purposes, but we do have a brilliant setting: the Brindabellas, and the hills out there, and the inner ridges. We've got everything going for us, we're not in a dry dustbowl at all. They are further west, but we're not. There's no reason why we can't have that beauty that's in the inner Canberra Valley.”

He concedes that Canberra is far from alone when it comes to low points in planning and vision; Sydney is in the doldrums, along with many towns and cities throughout the world.

“But I don't know that comparing ourselves with others is what it's all about,” he says.

“I'd rather compare ourselves with ourselves and say, well, we'd like it to be good.”

A Very Great City One Day, by Roger Pegrum, is published by Barrallier Books.