Concrete and carbuncles
Alan Powers
‘London smells Tory,’ announced Ian Martin, the Beachcomber of architectural journalism post-Boris in his weekly column in the Architects’ Journal. Heritage wars have broken out over the future of a concrete housing scheme, Robin Hood Gardens in East London by Alison and Peter Smithson, that is beloved of architects, but not, it seems, of many others. The Guardian devoted a page to complaints from classical architects that they were excluded en bloc from the Riba awards that lead to the Stirling Prize, and The Spectator is shortly to conduct a debate on whether Prince Charles’s opinion, delivered nearly 25 years ago, concerning glass stumps and monstrous carbuncles, remains as valid today.
Does architectural style have a simple relationship to political position? The early years of New Labour, when Richard Rogers was in the ascendant, may have given the impression that people would be made to like what they were told was good for them. In the Götterdkmmerung of Gordon Brown, the architecture minister, Margaret Hodge, has made her name by opposition to the claims of modern buildings to be considered as heritage. Lady Thatcher once bought a neo-Georgian house in Dulwich, and was ridiculed by the architectural establishment for it. Michael Heseltine commissioned neoclassical outbuildings by Quinlan Terry, and, to some extent, both were behaving true to type. Indifference and ignorance are more typical of politicians’ understanding of architecture, however, than informed choice. Ken Livingstone supported high buildings in London, and it was as natural as Tweedledum and Tweedledee that Boris Johnson should oppose them.
If we could discover what a majority of people thought about architecture, would a party be willing to adopt it to win votes? The Cameronian emphasis on quality of life, which includes the condition of cities and countryside rather than the facemasks of individual buildings, comes closer to issues capable of stirring an electorate. This brings us back to the Prince of Wales. In his famous 1984 speech at the Riba’s Gold medal award ceremony at Hampton Court, he made the remarks that are quoted in The Spectator’s debate motion, but he said a lot more besides. Looking back, one can see that a large section of the architectural establishment had been in revolt against its own record in the 1960s for at least ten years by that time. While the ‘glass stump’ of Mies van der Rohe’s proposed tower at No.1 Poultry gained backing from many establishment figures, it was already a museum piece, its architect 15 years dead. The original ‘carbuncle’, the National Gallery extension designed by Ahrends Burton and Koralek, was, it seems, singled out for opposition more on account of its superfluous tower than anything else, although the tower was, ironically, part of an attempt to match the spire of St Martin in the Fields and to fit in. ‘Carbuncle’ was a clever metaphor to choose, and it has ricocheted through architectural discourse in Britain ever since, partly because it can be applied to anything you don’t like.
Speakers at the debate can play at tu quoque by nominating carbuncles from the other side’s shot locker, but the world will remain unaltered. That seems to be the result of most architectural discussion. Apart from the state of the economy, after ten years in which architects have had little reason to starve, the architectural profession is worried about two things which should matter to everyone. One is their loss of control over the process of building. Britain has always been unusual in the way that architects have supervised construction of their own designs, and tried to ensure that their vision was carried through without cutting corners. This ethos remains strong, regardless of architectural style preferences, although those working for devel 1/2 opers and the public sector are most prone to find that, once their drawings have been used to get planning permission, they are given the shove-off.
The other worry is a more general if not universal one about the role of architecture in the crisis of global warming. This year’s Riba honorary and international fellowships were almost all given to green movement figures, including Aubrey Meyer, the inventor of ‘contraction and convergence’, and Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, who has promoted treeplanting by women. The Gold medallist of 2008 was, incidentally, Ted Cullinan, whom the Prince described in his 1984 speech as ‘a man after my own heart’.
The two anxieties (to which one could add the dismal quality of speculative house design and construction) sound like causes the Prince would support, whatever his opinions about individual buildings. A conference in Oxford next month marks 50 years since a previous Oxford Conference where architectural education was channelled away from pupillage and practice and towards academia. One of the Prince of Wales’s intentions in setting up his Institute of Architecture in 1992 was to try to break the monolithic structure of training and reintroduce a contextual, people-oriented and practical approach. The 2008 conference challenges the surviving status quo with a green agenda, so even the foundations of the ivory towers may be about to shift.
The architectural dualisms of the past still have resonance but can never be resolved, so to conduct a debate solely in the terms of the 1980s seems like a Groundhog Day of stale prejudice.
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