What the smart builder is building ARTS
TERENCE BENDIXSON
For centuries architecture's richest and most influential client was the church. Then came the owners of great landed estates, followed in turn by the merchants and industrialists who built stations as fine as Stephenson's Newcastle or Hardwick's Euston and offices as splendid as Waterhouse's Prudential in Holborn. And, wearing their other hats as aldermen and coun- cillors, these same Victorian tycoons commis- sioned the huge town halls of cities such as Leeds and Manchester, Bolton and Northamp- ton.
There is no doubt that the business world today has lost the primacy it possessed in the"7: last century : look, for instance, at the City of London where the country's biggest jungle of cheap and mediocre new architecture is already fraying at the edges and falling to pieces. Government and Church have managed scarcely better, judging by the new Ministry of Housing that overshadows the Houses of Parliament and the sugary conservatism of Coventry Cathedral.
The big spenders, in short, are no longer insti- tutions but the individuals who mortgage them- selves to the hilt to buy new houses straggling up around towns and villages all over the land —members of the new and much abused con- sumer democracy we have been carefully nurs- ing into being through full employment. And, alongside this insatiable hydra-headed house buyer, is another, more old-fashioned patron which carries on some of the old traditions— the local housing authorities. These, however, do not have to inhabit the houses they build and so a gulf opens up which countless sociologists have not so far managed to bridge.
The importance of local authorities as patrons of architecture, and particularly of domestic architecture, is illustrated by the six project awards recently presented by Architectural Design, the more avant-garde of Britain's two monthly building glossies. Three of the awards went to London boroughs, one to a new town in Cheshire and one to a rural council in Glam-
organ. The sixth was won by a Yorkshire hous- ing association. Furthermore, seven out of twelve honourable mentions were also com- missioned by councils. So much for the decay of local government.
These designs, none of which has yet been built, give some picture of what British archi- tects are doing : One immediate and obvious pointer is that tower blocks are out. They may still be sprouting in out of the way places such as Walsall, but all those piteous reports, com- missioned by the Rowntree Memorial Trust, on the isolation of flat-bound children and so
forth have evidently been read in progressive architectural circles. Which does not mean that the AD's architects are designing detached or semi-detached houses set in leafy glades. This • - may or may not be what every Englishman Wants but it is a style conspicuous by its absence from the pages of the architectural magazines. Sophisticated architects, for all their self-con- fessed social conscience, seldom concern-them- selves with designing what the population at large evidently admires, or at any rate buys. All this may change, of course, and more par-' ticularly under the impact of Herbert Ganes book, The Levittowners, about a lower middle-
class suburb in New Jersey: Mr Gans's defence of the split-level and coca-cola life of the suburbs—socially just as rich as the supposedly more cosmopolitan life of Chelsea and Green- wich Village—is certainly causing a stir among architects.
But, for the moment, what interests the avant- garde seems to be buildings stepped back like the terraces of a South Italian vineyard, so that successive householders can enjoy walking out on the roof of the one below. These terraces, much bigger than balconies, might almost be called outdoor rooms. This kind of design probably stems from an influential building along similar lines built at Halen in Switzerland a couple of years ago. It is a remarkably com- pact little community stepping down the side of an Alp and possessing the sharply defined edges —the distinct separation of town and country- side—that is one of the most eye-catching qualities of a village. Halen is tightly packed, with the narrow alleys, hemmed in squares, walls, the general feeling of man-madeness that is the essence of things urban; at the same time no point within it is more than a few minutes' walk from Alpine meadows.
What with the stepped image of Halen, and the craggy boxes of Habitat 67 at last year's Montreal Expo, we are likely to see a good many attempts at reshaping the conventional tall, smooth, extruded block of flats. And where convenient hill-sides do not provide the where- withall for step-backs, the outcome is likely to be pyramidal structures with hollow centres used for car parking or shopping centres. One such is already on the way in the London borough of Harringey.
The other idea that is being exchanged in the architectural market place stems particularly from research carried oul by Lionel March and Sir Leslie Martin at Cambridge. What they have done is to show the different ways in which buildings of the same volume can be arranged on a piece of land : extreme cases are a pencil thin tower in one corner, or a wafer of building that covers every inch of the site. This has led to a revival of interest in the built form that used to be the mainstay of property development, before the lift was invented and the high build- ing brought into existence—a method based on the fact that, within certain limits, the most economical way of fitting accommodation on to a site is to place a wall of buildings all around the edge. As the size of the site shrinks you are eventually left with a dank hole or light well in the midst of the block, like the greediest Victorian property developers who thus brought this form of building into disrepute.
Now it is the turn of the concept that suc- ceeded perimeter development—blocks of build- ings set in skimpy odd-angled lawns—to fall into disrepute. One need look no further than any typical area of mid-1950s domestic building near the heart of one of our larger towns to see why. The fenced-in lawns with their flowering cherries may make a pretence of giving Stepney or Gorbals the appearance of airy suburbs, but at the expense of private gardens or land that could be used for football or cops and robbers. So back go the architects to the classic eighteenth and nineteenth century row house— with one modification to cater for the only really big change in bourgeois family life since 1850, the motor cat. And, as with the domestic servants of yesteryear, the new transport servant is tucked traditionally away in the basement.
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