I want to make a short response to Professor Dennis Kilper's critique of Randall Stout's new museum design for the Roanoke Valley ("A museum of expensive mimicry," March 27 Commentary page).

I don't particularly want to argue Kilper's main point, namely that Stout's design is "cheap imitation - low-level mimicry" and yet somehow at the same time also too expensive and "easy and superficial." I also have visited some of Frank Gehry's recent works, and they leave me, too, yearning for something more substantial, and I wonder if in 10 years the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles will still be considered interesting and timely, as opposed to forgotten and dated.

It is clear that Stout's time working for Gehry has influenced his design and his sense of spatial quality. And that is all right. Architects have always been influenced by the people they have worked with and for.

Is this design right for Roanoke? Is it the best we can do? I don't know. I do know that this new structure will be a far cry from the form and taste of Hotel Roanoke Tudor, and that is probably a good thing.

I have heard it said that this new building will try to be designed in such a way that it will receive a silver rating by the U.S. Green Building Council as measured by the LEED (Leadership Energy and Environmental Design) rating program, the main measure of sustainable building design at this time. If this is true, this is a very good thing for the building and the Roanoke Valley. This alone leads one to believe that it will be energy efficient by definition, and this would tend to refute Kilper's main point, namely that the building is too expensive and cost inefficient.

What I really want to take issue with is Kilper's etymology of the word history. He states that the word implies His-story or God's story. Nothing could be further from the truth, and Kilper, as a leading academician at one of Virginia's leading universities and one of the country's leading schools of architecture and design, ought to know better.

The word is ancient Greek in origin, 'istoria, and means inquiry, systematic or scientific observation; body of recorded cases; written account of one's inquiries and a narrative of past events. This has nothing to do with God, Christian or otherwise, and a religious text. The first recorded history is accorded to Herodotus and his stories and the telling of the Persian and Greek wars of the fifth century B.C.

The Greeks did not have at the core root of their existence a belief in a monotheistic godhead and, thus, their invention of the scholarly form of research and writing that has come to be known as history has no root in Christian or Judaic thoughts on God.

Perhaps Kilper meant this etymology as a rhetorical flourish. But in this day and age when scientific inquiry is being attacked from all sides, from our political leaders who systematically hide and degrade scientific studies that show greenhouse gases are threatening our planet to religious irrationalists who deny scientific theory and fact as embodied in biology and evolution, this rhetoric is a dangerous and sophistic enterprise, and one not worthy of Kilper's stature.