Power and status in the city

Robert Adam on why he believes Ken Livingstone wants more skyscrapers in London

About a year ago Ken Livingstone said that he would like to see 15 new skyscrapers in London. Why 15? No one knew. Two weeks ago he came clean. In the new draft 'London Plan' he doesn't beat about the bush, he positively promotes skyscrapers. Now the gloves are off, Livingstone wants to change the face of central London and skyscrapers are his instrument. If he has his way there could be many more than 15. Last year there was an unseemly scramble to apply for permission for tall buildings. Now there could be an avalanche.

Why would the mayor want to do this to one of the world's great historic cities? At first sight he is an unlikely candidate. This is the same 'Red Ken' who drove Thatcher to close down the Greater London Council for good. This is the unreconstructed socialist who stole the crown in New Labour's flagship mayoral election. Skyscrapers usually house capitalist enterprises and are potent symbols of the power of capital. So it seems odd, to say the least, that Livingstone, the socialist bogeyman, should be actively promoting these beacons of the very free enterprise that Margaret Thatcher rescued from the dark night of British post-war socialism.

The reasons are twofold: status and power. It is the status of the skyscraper, the status of the mayor and the status of London as, to use Livingstone's favourite expression, a 'world city'. The power is the mayor's lack of power. He is so hamstrung by a hostile government that he can leave his mark on the city only through his role in the development of the city.

The mayor's approval of major new buildings is personal. For example, he supported the construction of a 42-storey tower by the American architects Kohn Pederson Fox. The government forced a public enquiry and a trail of witnesses from the architectural establishment poured in to oppose or support this monster. Lord (Richard) Rogers, architectural advisor to the mayor and Modernist hero, gave evidence in favour of skyscrapers. He claimed his evidence was impartial in spite of the fact that he was proposing to build two more elsewhere in the city. Even the Prince of Wales weighed in to question this 'adolescent' passion for height, although he did not stoop to the witness stand. We will not know the outcome of this enquiry for some months.

One interesting outcome of the evidence in the enquiry was the economic case for skyscrapers. There is none — except for a possible increase in value by the status of size. But still they will not go away. The ability to build to a great height is irresistible. Just look at the small but wealthy

Gulf emirates, where adjacent principalities compete for the tallest building, or the Pacific Rim, where skyscrapers assert world status for the Asian tiger economies.

The Mayor of London's rage for skyscrapers is based on the rather simple idea that for a world city to be a world city it must have skyscrapers. It is assumed, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, that to maintain London's pre-eminent role as the banking centre of Europe it must have more skyscrapers than the German banking capital, Frankfurt. But would bankers really decide to come to London because it has a few more skyscrapers than Frankfurt? Are Paris, Berlin or Rome in economic decline because they ban tall buildings in their historic centres? Of course not.

A parade of tall buildings has been coming up for planning permission and now, with the new draft plan, there are sure to be many more in the pipeline. They are often by the world's great architects — international names can turn normally obstructive planning officers into poodles. Helmut Jahn, Renzo Piano, Santiago Calatrava, Lord (Norman) Foster and — for the second time — Kohn Pedersen Fox are all having a go. alongside B-list UK architects. The result is both fascinating and deeply depressing.

The most compelling design idea behind most of these huge and expensive buildings is an interesting shape. So, we see gherkinshaped buildings, arrowhead-shaped buildings, amoeba-shaped buildings, rectangular buildings which lean sharply to one side, oval buildings with angular cut-off tops and so on and so on. The only exciting idea is that the shape is, well, interesting. What does the architect do with this large but interesting shape? Clad it in glass, of course. What else? It might, as with Renzo Piano's new tower, be interesting glass cladding or glass cladding with an exposed structure, as with Lord Foster's cigarshaped building, but in the end it is just glass cladding.

What is sadly absent is one ounce of architectural direction, one scintilla of intellectual speculation or one hint of wider meaning. This Modernism is so ideologically bankrupt that it has nothing left to say and subsists on a lumpen confidence that it owns the future. All it can advance is abstract shape making. These buildings are architectural one-liners: once you've got the artless message there's nothing left.

Maybe, in the right places, tall buildings can add something exciting to our capital. But must we be stuck with more of the same? Are we just left with more peculiar and, therefore, more 'interesting' shapes by the likes of Frank 'Bilbao' Gehry and Daniel 'V&A spiral' Libeskind? What happened to the legacy of the inventors, the American architects who created the fine and complex Beaux-Arts monoliths that stood for the huge wealth of the great preDepression nation?

In fewer than 50 years, America learnt how to extend classical and Beaux-Arts traditions to buildings of great height, buildings the Imperial Romans would have built if only they could. They created something truly new which, for all that, still rang with the echoes of our cultural history. At the base, bold doorways sat at the street edge in elaborate palaces: temples adorned the skyline; and between them floors upon floors, little seen, were bare and simple. This was the base, capital and shaft of the classical column writ large. For half a century variations on these designs decorated cities in America and across the world. Then, unhappily, in the name of revolution and the avant-garde, they were discarded and are now forgotten.

Today, superstar architects trot the globe and trade in novelty. Across the world, cities seek glamour from their latest whimsies and lesser architects aspire to their egos. But, in the end, novelty defeats itself; freak piles upon freak and all is finally the same. Meanwhile, the discrete charm of ancient cities is degraded as yet another great architect's big idea crashes its eccentric shape straight into the street and exposes its full self in unused and useless windblown plazas. To hell with the spirit of the place, our cultural legacy has become an irrelevance to be trammelled in the rush for fame and a fantasy future.

Must London fall victim to this hubris in the pursuit of what the draft London Plan calls 'world class architecture'? In his race to make his mark, Ken Livingstone and a supporting cast of superstar architects may not so much keep London a world city as make London a city like any other in the world.

Robert Adam is a director of Robert Adam Architects.