ARTS
Architecture
Intelligent intervention
Gavin Stamp
A Vision of Britain (V & A, till 19 November) To any architectural critic who has been around for a decade or more, the renewed 'Great Debate' or 'Battle of the Styles' unleashed by the Prince of Wales on television and in every newspaper induces a feeling of dija vu, not to say intense boredom. For many of his arguments have long been aired and, more important, won.
Urns on the skyline at the overpraised Richmond Riverside development That is why the general quality of British architecture, in terms of the use of mate- rials, respect for context and an imagina- tive reinterpretation of tradition, is much better than it was, say, 15 years ago. It was back in the early 1970s that we needed a figure with the authority of the Prince of Wales to speak out against the self- justifying dogmas of the Modern Move- ment establishment. But that, of course, is absurd, for in that distant past not only did HRH himself have rather less authority, being rather younger, but the very subject of architecture was regarded as non-visual by television people, while newspapers considered it just plain boring. Nor would a national museum of the authority of the V & A have given such space to an exhibition which the ranks of knighted architects would have advised was thor- oughly and dangerously reactionary — certainly not before 1974 when Sir John Pope-Hennessy was busy hiding the de- corative splendours of his museum building under hardboard and gluing down lino on its mosaic floors.
The exhibition now expensively and sensibly mounted at the V & A is the show of the book of the twice-broadcast televi- sion film. This cannot be forgotten, for television sets placed strategically around the perimeter incessantly repeat sequ- ences from the Prince of Wales's filmed commentary, so that the maddening repeti- tion of the theme music might well drive away the visitor long before the great wealth of architectural drawings, models, books and photographs has been fully studied. And that would be a pity, for there is an important argument presented here, articulated by quotations from the book of the film.
It is the eponymous book (Doubleday, £16.95 — all royalties to charity) which really matters. The exhibition might well give the impression that what HRH wants is merely a return to Classicism, while the book goes further and provides an intelli- gent defence of humane values in architecture and rightly extols the virtues of the Gothic Revival and Arts and Crafts tradition as well as the Classical. But perhaps what is most remarkable about the text is its unembarrassed acceptance of the complex associational and spiritual qual- ities of architecture, and of the deep religious and atavistic needs it can satisfy in human beings. In this, the book belongs in a great tradition of architectural writing. By comparison the shrill outpourings of the Prince of Wales's self-appointed opponents in the RIBA appear all the more barbarous and naïve in their unfet- tered worship of technology and progress. This newly expanded text is valuable because it rebuts the charges made after the first screening of the film that the Prince of Wales is interested merely in 'pastiche' or 'Disneyland' architecture. No- thing is more tiresome than the pejorative use of that irritating term 'pastiche', for it is only ever applied to essays in traditional styles. The fact is that almost all architects are pasticheurs or copyists, for less than one per cent can be truly creative. Most modern architects used to do pastiches of the seminal monuments by Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe; now they imitate James Stirling, Richard Rogers or other fashionable figures. A few do pastiches of Palladian houses. Why are they, in princi- ple, any less creative? What matters is whether they do it well or badly, approp- riately or inappropriately, intelligently or stupidly.
Nor is this book just an attack on architects. It is also a remarkable analysis of architecture as an expression of our society as a whole. Of course economic and political forces shape the way our buildings look and it is as unfair to blame architects alone for the disastrous industrialised high- rise housing programmes and urban renew- al policies of the 1960s as it is to saddle them with sole responsibility for the sheer awfulness of the new Docklands. But in making a necessary search for what went wrong in the post-war years, the Prince of Wales and his unnamed but not unknown advisers make a point which, because it is so devastatingly put and because it accords so well with what I have long maintained, I cannot resist quoting in full:
It wasn't the local councillors, or the de- velopers, who had read Le Corbusier and other apostles of modernism, and then per- suaded reluctant architects to adopt 'progres- sive' ideas. Architects deliberately staged a revolution within their own organisation and their own system of education. It was the 'great architects' of this period who con- vinced everyone that the world would be safe in their hands. Their descendants still retain prestige, and a kind of glamour among their peers: they set the style, control the curricu- lum, and have commanding positions in the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Royal Fine Art Commission, and the Royal Academy. It is they who keep a tight grip on architectural education and who are heroes of a largely sycophantic architectural press, and the focus of much uncritical attention from the media in general.
Perhaps the most important consequ- ence of the Prince's intervention in architecture is the renewed interest he has encouraged in building codes. Pace succes- sive presidents of the RIBA, he under- stands that civilised cities have always been regulated by such laws and that there was no reason for London to abandon height restrictions when Paris and Rome and Washington retained theirs and yet remain vigorous commercial centres. And, to prove his point, his most imaginative piece of architectural patronage has been to commission the revolutionary traditionalist urbanist, Leon Krier, to design a new village outside Dorchester for the Duchy of Cornwall. This is on display in the exhibi- tion, as are illustrations of the efficacy of the 'Ten Principles' (rather than 'Com- mandments') which HRH thinks should govern the creation of decent, socially responsible and beautiful (a word he is happily not ashamed to use) architecture.
These Principles are as unexceptionable as they are, inevitably, vague: harmony, scale, hierarchy and so forth, combined with the desirability of having art and decoration in buildings. Unfortunately, however, the undogmatic nature of good architecture is demonstrated by the central building-within-a-building in the show (de- signed by David Lloyd Jones of the firm RMJM). On this Michael Darby of the V & A has tried to demonstrate the Ten Principles with examples from the sur- rounding area. The trouble is that South Kensington must be one of the worst models for architectural excellence in the Prince's terms, particularly in the use of materials. For most buildings are either faced in stucco — a sham — or in terracotta, an industrialised and similarly non-regional material which, for all its excellent qualities, scarcely supports the Prince's condemnation of the modern use of plastic and other substitutes for local stones. Also, it is too little appreciated how much the Victorians in fact heightened the scale of mediaeval and Georgian London in their highly specialised public buildings. The intervention of progress in architectu- ral history cannot really be seriously de- nied.
But the main criticism of the Prince's Vision stems from a nagging doubt about quality. There are some excellent new buildings which make intelligent use of. tradition presented here for edification, such as housing by Jeremy Dixon, William Whitfield's Whitehall building, John Out- ram's Isle of Dogs pumping station, Frank Roberts's church in Preston, the library in Hampshire by Robert Adam and the re- markable Krishnamurti Centre designed in a creative Arts and Crafts manner by Keith Critchlow. But there is also some distres- sing mediocrity. It is sad to find the new Grand Buildings in Trafalgar Square extol- led for the virtues of combining high-tech interiors with traditional facades, for the point about the old Grand Buildings was that it was a piece of second-rate illiterate Victorian commercial Classicism and could, and should, have been replaced by something better.
Similarly, my criticism of the shopping centre in Canterbury by BDP is not that it is a pastiche because neo-Georgian and gabled timber facades are proposed; it is that these artificially picturesque exteriors have no immediate topograpical or histor- 'I thought we'd get to kill Germans.' ical justification and bear no relation to the spaces or structure behind. Such a develop- ment is simply bad as architecture, if satisfactory as a stage set. As with Quinlan Terry's overpraised Richmond Riverside, the telling criticism is not the choice of style but the unimaginative way in which the style is handled. In both there is no attempt to use a style as a coherent expressive language and there is no con- sistency between interior and exterior. In short, they lack architectural integrity. 'Integrity', indeed, is the quality conspic- uously missing among the Ten Principles. Yet it was never the exclusive preserve of a so-called Functionalist architecture and is to be found in the best buildings of all styles: Classical, Gothic, vernacular or Modern Movement.
Another worry is that there seems little scope for the truly monumental in British architecture and for a Hawksmoor, say, to be true to himself within the Prince's Ten Principles. I fear HRH has little apprecia- tion of purely abstract geometrical architecture, as is shown by his embarras- singly trite dismissal of the National Theatre as a 'nuclear power station' when it is a serious, if flawed, monumental composition. But perhaps, with our architectural schools turning out culpably impractical graduates who are longing to design avant-garde monuments rather than the decent ordinary buildings which are essential, we do not really need any Hawks moors at the moment.
Previous page
