Unloved architects
Christopher Booker
Anyone interested in the present strange, almost unbelievably confused and neurotic state of British architecture might well take a look at a rather remarkable exhibition which opened on Tuesday at the Architectural Association in Bedford Square (closing on 10 August). The exhibition shows the work which has been done over the past twelve months by the students who will help to shape our towns and cities over the next forty years.
On the on,e hand, most of the exhibits reflect, in a rather tired way, that extraordinary remote dream world into which most young architects have been disappearing over the past decade. One unit, for instance, spent much of the past year 'in front of four local street corners', making 'proposals' for the improvement of London. These ranged from dated pastiche designs for new buildings to 'more ephemeral things such as giant flames, programmes for neon lighting and a "Warm Wall" that the bums of the neighbourhood can just loll against'. Another team, clearly inspired by Swift's Academy of Lagado,spent two weeks trying to design 'a bridge that is also a library, to replace Waterloo Bridge'. 'The bridge', they declared, 'was to be treated as a selfcontained urban element which contain. another architype [sic], the library—a record of a civilisation. The interaction of these two public spaces called for the reevaluation of a number of related models— cell, cloister, groves of academia, browserie, cafenion [sic], encyclopedium etc.'
On the other hand, two or three of the AA teams seem to have been inhabiting an entirely different place of learning. That led by former Covent Garden chief-planner Brian Anson, for instance, fiercely attacks 'the architects of the authoritarian ,Left' and experts who must tear themselves away from 'traffic flows and ,Shopping zones' and renLmber. that they are 'designing for people'. Another group, led by Dick Hiobin, set out to explain 'why 20,000 architectS, working for twenty-five years' managed to turn 'the post-war housing effort, one of the greatest opportunities ever offered to the
profession, into such an appalling mess'. Looking for 'real traditions on which to build', the Hobin team spent their year simply trying to design, in a practical, lowkey sort of way, a housing scheme for North London—ending up with what, in one or two instances, not only looks remarkably like Victorian terrace housing, but quite explicitly is trying to pick up where that long-derided tradition left off. '
In fact the AA exhibition is yet another reflection of the quite remarkable collapse of confidence which has taken place in the riast few years throughout the British architectural profession. Of course the most immediate cause of the architects' total gloom at the moment is simply that they are going through the most severe unemployment crisis the profession has ever known: the collapse of the property market, and public construction cutbacks, have meant that literally thousands of architects are out of work ; a recent RIBA bulletin showed that orders were at their lowest level 'since records were kept' ; and hundreds of practices have either shrunk to only a handful of staff, or have closed down altogether.
But the real reason for the crisis goes much deeper—it in fact reflects nothing less than a collapse of confidence in one of the most important cultural manifestations of the twentieth century, the modern movement in architecture.
The movement which began back in the early years of the century with the futuristic dreams of Gamier and Sant'Elia, which burgeoned in the 'twenties with the Bauhaus and, above all, the town-planning visions of Le Corbusier, was never really seen until too late for what it was—not just a branch of modern art, but a totalitarian Utopian' ideology. For nearly fifty years, 'modern architecture', and the planning ideology which went with it, remained little more than a rather curious minority cult, comparable with post-Cubist painting. And it was only with the opportunities created by World War Two, and the coincident seachange in consciousness, that the modern movement emerged in the late 'forties and 'fifties as the new orthodoxy. Architecture has been 'liberated' by technology from the old 'constrictions' of the dying classical and vernacular traditions—and the cities of the world blossomed forth With tower blocks, slabs and a mass of hew shapes in concrete and glass, in a way not comparable With anything that had ever happened before in history.
It was only after a decade or two of attempting to realise this Utopian vision that its fundamentally schizophrenic nature began to become clear—in the staggering contrast between the exciting world of the dream, the plan and the drawing, and the hideous, impersonal reality of discolouring concrete blocks and bleak, windswept spaces. It was all a gigantic exercise in fantasy—and by the mid-'sixties, reality was beginning to hit back. This showed in the emergence of the conservation movement, as people suddenly decided in ever more vociferous numbers that they did not want their old familiar form of architecture to be pulled down to make way for these remote architectural visions. It showed symbolically in the crisis brought about by the Ronan Point disaster of 1968, when it suddenly became apparent that architects had even lost touch with the technical ability to put up their buildings properly. And in the past three or four years, the tide has swung so completely against modern architecture, and in favour of conservation, rehabilitation, 'low rise' and clinging onto the old at all costs, that it has finally got through to the architects themselves that nobody loves them, and that they stand forlorn and beleaguered in a hostile world.
The architects' reaction has been twofold. On the one hand, to save their self-esteem, there has been an ever more desperate, lastditch stand to defend the modern movement at all costs—which has manifested itself in the near-deification of certain architects and their buildings, like Lasdun's messy and undistinguished National Theatre, or Darbourne and Dark's Lillington Gardens council estate in Vauxhall Bridge Road, or any of the chaotically ugly monstrosities put up by 'Saint' Jim Stirling. 'At least these are masterpieces', the architects cry, 'and if you dare to criticise them, then you are simply an ignorant, philistine layman who has no knowledge of architecture'. In its most extreme form this kind of Vaager-mentality', based on total alienation from the rest of society, has produced the A rchigram, Cedric Price kind of fantasy world of unbuilt and unbuildable visions, with which most of the children of the architectural schools have been playing since the mid'sixties.
On the other hand, there are many, more sober architects who, dimly aware that a God has Failed, are today simply groping about in the dark, wondering just how far back into the evolution of architecture they will have to go before they can once again find a rock of tradition on which their feet can rest. Neo-Georgian ? The Victorian terrace? The pattern-books on which, until the modern movement came along, almost all building except special, 'one-off' architectural monuments were based? Perhaps we have broken the mould, and there is no longer any rock on which to rest ? But in that respect, the plight of the contemporary architect is hardly unique. Perhaps the crisis of modern architecture is simply a microcosm of our much wider cultural crisis—in which case our poor architects need not feel so desperately alone and unloved as they only too obviously (and I'm afraid rather pleasingly) do.
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