Arts
Postmodernism in Hillingdon
Gavin Stamp
The reaction of the establishment modern architects and planners to Christopher Booker's tele-documentary City of Towers was predictable: pained surprise and outrage that the results of their deep idealism and social concern could ever be ques tioned, together with a pathetic eagerness to jump on the new bandwagon. 'Modern Architecture is dead; Long Live Modern Architecture,' they cry; 'Yes, we made a few mistakes, but what about the positive achievements?'
Certainly, some interesting housing has been built in the decade since Ronan Point — much with pitched roofs and in brick — but there is precious little in Britain to illustrate the phenomenon of 'Postmodernism' about which Charles Jencks has written (The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, Academy £5.95). The British architectural world still seems most impressed by the prodigal trendiness of the Sixties — pseudoengineering by James Stirling and glass sheaths by Norman Foster. It might well be concluded that nothing has really changed, for comparatively little has been published about the one modern building which may well come to be seen as the most significant British building of the decade: Hillingdon Civic Centre. Others have seen the point of it, however. Paul Johnson has written about Hillingdon twice; once condemning it as yet another expensive palace for bureaucrats, and then praising it as the manifestation of a change of heart: a piece of architecture which tries to be humane and traditional while still being modern. Johnson was right both times.
Hillingdon Civic Centre is a great multifacetted rambling pile of red-brick and tiles squatting in the centre of Uxbridge, near London Airport. Commissioned in 1970 and begun in 1973, it will only finally be completed this spring. The building has been criticised, of course, by local ratepayers on account of its huge cost, but it seems to be — as far as a public edifice ever can be — a genuinely popular building. It was commissioned by a Conservative council and built by a Labour one. It is the result of the strongest of briefs from the client. Hillingdon, a middle-class borough, knew what it wanted and what most people hated: unless the architects gave them a design in the new humane style of brick and pitched roofs they would look elsewhere. The architects, Robert Matthew, JohnsonMarshall, and Partners, are one of those giant impersonal firms who have been responsible for a number of unmemorable large modern developments. Here, how ever, they were obliged to suppress their Modern Movement consciences and try and design a large building in harmony with the character of the area.
But what is the character of Hillingdon, an arbitrary and amorphous administrative district? It is, of course, suburban. Uxbridge is now part of the outer suburbs of northwest London, which are full of examples of `By-Pass Variagated' and Osbert Lan caster's other classes of inter-war detached and semi-detached housing. Debased and diluted from the original prototypes of Norman Shaw, Lutyens and Voysey though these may be, they arguably represent the true tradition of the Arts & Crafts much more than Pevsner's 'Pioneers of the Modern Movement' and the design team had the wit to see this.
Their leader, Andrew Derbyshire, wrote of the despised suburbs that 'It was here,. . . that the ideals of William Morris were, perhaps unconsciously, but nevertheless sincerely upheld by the millions who voted with their feet out of the "Great Wen" of the big city and put their money where their hearts were in the purchase of houses . . . which instinctively (and mostly without the help of professional architects) epitomised the popular image of "home": The Modem Movement has ignored, to its cost and peril, the 'signs' about homeliness present in old domestic architecture, so that today the suburban house can signify liberty and individuality in opposition to the totalitarian image of the tower-block.
To grasp the essence of the suburban style Derbyshire and his team toured the area in search of the proper details for brick cornices and lintels, for the shapes of eaves and the pitches of roofs. In consequence Hillingdon has superb brickwork and, as a result.of the 'grain' of the interior open-plan being at a 45-degree angle to the walls, a complex external elevation of angular walls, set-backs and hipped-gables. However, the design is far from being a simple essay in the semi-detached vernacular manner. Most extraordinarily, it is full of resonances of early 20th-century interpretations of the Gothic Revival and Arts & Crafts traditions; it manifests a twice-removed sophistication in its style which may spring from the same approach to precedent adopted earlier by architects like Goodhart-Rendel or Harold Gibbons (a 1939 church by whom the design team discovered and admired).
In short, we have here a major public building which accepts that there is more in the 20th century than one absolute style. Modern Movement morality goes deep; there are still plenty of critics who equate a pitched roof with fascism. 'I'm less schizophrenic; I'm shrugging off some of my guilt,' confesses Derbyshire, who is, nevertheless, defensive: 'I don't like the way people say "so you've abandoned Modern Architecture". We have to recover some of the lost threads which got lost in the maelstrom.'
There is still plenty of the Modern Movement at Hillingdon Civic Centre. The brick walls contain a typical open-plan over-serviced cocoon for bureaucrats and the whole design is deeply flawed because the architects were not able to follow through the logic of their new-found style. The huge volumes of pitched roof contain nothing but services although they could have been exploited by the simple device of the dormer window. In many places the brickwork can be seen to be but a wrapping around a raw concrete frame and, as an overall composition, the building is somewhat formless and much inferior in picturesque and asymmetrical massing to the town halls of the Victorians. Inspection of early drawings and models suggests that the architects only began to learn to exploit their style as the project advanced. One must hope that they go much further in future jobs — perhaps using revolutionary ideas like having windows that actually open and separate rooms instead of costly and inconvenient open-plans.
So, is Hillingdon Civic Centre a halfhearted sham, a clever, cynical exercise in By-Pass Pastiche; a public relations exercise to Give Bureaucracy a Human Face? Or is it the first great British monument showing a return to more humane and less doctrinaire principles of design, a belated recognition of the continuing value of traditional forms of architecture? The building is full of interest and magnificent in detail; it is also undeniably and palpably modern but the very fact that it can be discussed at all in terms of precedent and association give some cause for hope that a truly civilized modern architecture is still possible in Britain.
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