'High tee': the new barbarians
Gavin Stamp
`. . What the RPP have perpetrated amounts to a violation of sanity. It is treason . . . Ladies and Gentlemen, I beg you, hound them down . . These are words not spoken at a fascist rally but in front of the Royal Institute of British Architects last March, when they were received with general enthusiasm. The speaker, the Dutch modern architect Aldo van Eyck, was using the acronym `RPP' for 'Rats, Posts, and other Pests', a not very amusing term to describe those architects who have responded to the general collapse of confidence in the old Modern Movement by taking up 'Post-Modernism': a return to experimenting with styles and with conventional materials, in an attempt to regain the approval of the public and to connect architecture again with the many traditions discarded earlier this century.
'Post-Modernists' — a horrid and mis-used term — are regarded with fury and contempt by a large number of modern architects who still subscribe to the pure canons of the Modern Movement. Blaming the palpable social and functional failures of the systembuilt housing and the city-centre redeveloments of the post-war years on government, on local authorities, on economics, on the public, on anybody but the architects, they regard the quiet, gauche attempts all over Britain to design low, informal 'neovernacular' housing in brick with pitched roofs as a retreat and a betrayal. After years of public dissatisfaction and the growth of powerful conservation movements, after the pertinent attacks on 20th century ideals mounted by such luminaries of the so-called 'New Right' as David Watkin and Roger Scruton, and by Christopher Booker in his City of Towers programme, it must not be assumed that this section of the architectural profession is prepared to re-examine its position and discard its belief that it is the architects' job to re-order society. Now a counter-attack on Post-Modernists, and conservationists is being mounted.
After the first disputed election in over 50 years, a new President of the RIBA has just been elected who believes it is his job to restore confidence to the profession and to give 'a new emphasis on the promotion of architects and architecture.' This is Owen Luder, an architect who principally special ises in shopping centres; he is an articulate spokesman for the view widely held amongst architects that the mediocrity of most modern British architecture is attri butable to restrictive and ignorant planning controls — and so it is, but one of the principal reasons for this is the appalling results of insufficient control in the Fifties and Sixties. The most interesting part of this counter-attack is the promotion of certain avant-garde architects whose work still fulfils the ideals of the Modern Movement. One candidate for this ought to be Richard Seifert, who has had more modern buildings built in every fashionable style over the past two decades than any other architect and who evidently manages both to satisfy clients and be successful. But in a profession still imbued with the utopian ideals of the Thirties, he is too tainted with vulgar commercialism. The most favoured modern architects of the post-war years made their names with buildings for clients rather less exacting than business — universities — and the star here is James Stirling, who may shortly be building the Tate Gallery Extension. However, Stirling has disappointed some of his admirers by dabbling with Neo-Classicism and the 'new historicism' when he established his reputation by exploiting an industrial aesthetic by using engineering bricks and tiles and patent glazing. Stirling (with his former partner, Gowan) created memorable images of no-nonsense, functional efficiency in Leicester, Cambridge and Oxford; unfortunately, the buildings were not at all functional or efficient and the technology astonishingly crude.
Stirling has therefore been superseded by younger architects who more successfully employ both the imagery and the substance of technology and mass-production: they actually build the strident, mechanistic images of Paolozzi. The most famous of these are Richard Rogers and Norman, Foster. Loosely described as 'High Tec' architects, they are currently the darlings of the architectural establishment. There is much that is intelligent about 'High Tec' architecture, and, significantly, it has appealed to industry and has not relied exclusively on government or arts patronage. It accepts the fact that architecture today depends to a great extent on efficient services — lighting, heating and air-conditioning — whose disposition and efficiency present problems which Wren, or even Lutyens, never had to face. The poor quality of technical services in Britain (a country which usually does not need them owing to our clement climate) is .one principal reason why modern British architecture compares so badly with the slick, stylish building of America. 'High Tec' is not interested in historical styles or resonances, or even in the imagery 01 permanence; it is architecture of apparent flexibility and mechanical efficiency. displays both structure and services; it aesthetic is one of visible trusses and girders, of coloured pipes and prominent grilles, of minimal detailing and smooth reticent surfaces of glass or metal. At its best, as in the factories designed by Farrell and Grimshaw, it stylishly and economical!), exploits the availability of mass-produced industrial components. When, however, it attempts to go beyond standard modern technology, it is an architecture which can be extravagant to build and to maintain.
Richard Rogers and Norman Foster were in partnership in Team 4 in the late Sixties; now, as plum jobs fall to them and they successfully compete for exposure on television, they are rivals. There was a degree of unseemly bickering when each discovered that the other's project was also being featured in the May number of the Architectural Review — Foster won: his Hongkong and Shanghai Bank design was put on the cover.
When he was in partnership with Renzo Piano — assisted by the engineer Ted Happold — Rogers leapt to prominence with the most famous of 'High Tec' buildings: the Pompidou Centre in Paris. It was the Most prominent European expression of the 'Archigram' ideas of the Sixties: the enthusiasm for `Megastructures' and for the 'serviced shed' advocated in the books of Reyner Banham. As a result, Rogers has become a huge success in Britain. Norman Foster has actually built rather More than Rogers. The headquarters of Willis Faber Dumas in Ipswich is a vast cocoon of open-plan offices complete with swimming-pool and roof garden, enclosed within a reflecting undulating glass wall. This is minimalist architecture: at night the interior of the building is visible; by day it reflects the buildings opposite which — it is doubtless banal to observe — is only interesting if there are interesting buildings to reflect. The flush, reticent detailing of the large glass panels is much admired, even by Americans whose own flashy HyattRegency Hotels seem just as sophisticated and rather more exciting.
Foster Associates' other principal building is the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Ai ts at the University of East Anglia: a huge hangar clad in aluminium and glass which contains within its humming, muted interior tiny art objects as well as offices for art-historians. The dominant feature of the interior is the grey ducting visible above the transparent ceiling; the external panels are all interchangeable — although wherever the entrance is, it seems ill-equipped to deal with East Anglian rain. Foster, like Rogers, certainly understands mechanical services — but the question remains as to whether a more conventional sort of building could not perform the same function without the high running costs of a building which copes with climatic and functional problems by mechanical rather than static architectural methods.
'High Tec' is a legacy of the Sixties when it was assumed that energy would always be cheap and it is ironic that such ideas are being realised in the depressed, expensive Eighties, when it is reasonable to ask whether such buildings are economical as well as sophisticated and 'exciting'. Foster and Rogers have certainly given modern British architecture a boost and a revival of confidence which it needed — but, in the end, they have diminished their profession. In the century-long battle between the architect and the engineer, the engineers have won. Neither architect can be in control of such complex structures themselves; rather, they are the heads of teams and they rely on structural engineers and technical consultants. Ultimately, both are public relations men; the smooth, fashionably dressed, quiet-spoken Rogers is superb at the soft sell while Foster has a more abrasive, demotic image, flying his own helicopter around the country and working from an open-plan office which has doors like those on ships — with sills over which non-'High Tec' mortals tend to trip. 'High Tec' is concerned with packaging and style: there seems no functional reason for painting pipes Day-Glow orange or that vivid green sported by Citroen cars.
Not all buildings are factories. The tragedy is that 'High Tec' architecture simply opts out of the problems which have always been the real tests of an architect's skill: the control of mass and scale, the functional organisation of space, the creation of a stable, static structure suitable in the environment to which an intelligent and comprehensible form is given — a comprehensible form which need not necessarily be understood in terms of the humanist styles evolved by tradition. 'High Tec' architecture no more answers the lasting problems of architecture, of appropriate symbolic expression, of permanence, of how to create the spaces in which men need to live and function socially, than did the glittering novelty of the Crystal Palace — as Ruskin pointed out 130 years ago. I, for one, would rather have the arid, arrogant formalism of the Modern Movement. A building like Lasdun's National Theatre can at least be appreciated in terms of mass, shape and space. But perhaps the real virtue of 'High Tee' architecture is that its buildings will not last for very long, as technology is notoriously short-lived.
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