Last Friday at 9am, the phone rang at Richard Rogers's hi-tech office by the Thames at Hammersmith, west London. On the line was an aide to Qatar's royal family, the architect's client on a multibillion pound housing project on the site of the former Chelsea barracks.
The news was not good. After two and a half years of design work and days before expecting to win planning permission, the award-winning firm was sacked. The royal aide told Rogers a press statement would be released within an hour. Rogers desperately argued his corner, trying to persuade the Qataris they were making a mistake, but he could tell the game was up.
His name was never mentioned, but everyone knew: Prince Charles had struck again; and for the third time in his long career Rogers was left to come to terms with the Prince of Wales wrecking his projects.
"It knocked the stuffing out of me, and the design team even more," Rogers said , in his first interview since his sacking. "We had hoped that Prince Charles had retreated from his position on modern architecture, but he single-handedly destroyed this project."
not surprising--Britain is unbelievably beholden to elites, tradition and class structure. You can get hardly more elite than a crown prince, and in such a traditional-minded society, the whims of a crown prince hold a lot of sway.
No offense... I mean the Chelsea Barracks weren't necessarily a pretty site but there is nothing "London" about that site. I mean you can argue what "London" means and all that jazz but England has notably suffered under the intrusion of modernist architecture.
I know this brings up contention but anyone who has watched 45 minutes of the BBC knows that modernist architecture and poverty go hand-in-hand. Frankly, the new fancy stuff was the tool of a highly active government between the 60s to the 90s filling up the country with tons of modernist "housing estates" that have done little to nothing other than be slightly more successful than American housing projects.
Furthermore, the aesthetics of a building are one of the few things citizens whole-heatedly support in terms of planning. Why? I do not entirely know but this is something that everyone (with a voice) seems to want government to actually do.
Furthermore, It's not your country. It's not the people's country. It is Queen Mum's country. She owns... what 85% of the island? If you want to talk about personal freedoms and property rights... I wouldn't because she can exercise her property rights. She also holds the power to dissolve the government at any moment.
hillandrock: The Queen Mother is dead...Besides that, no one in the Royal Family owns anywhere close to 85% of all the land in the country. The Forestry Commission and the MoD own more. However, this is not to say that there are not huge land management issues in the UK, because there are.
Charles should shut his mouth, he is a nonce, but (unfortunately) lots of people listen to him. There was a program on food a while back, stimulated by Charles' attack on fast food. They revealed that his Duchy Cornish Pasty had way more fat and sugar than a Big Mac meal and cost more. He is an outdated hypocrite and a buffoon and I hope that for some reason or other he never becomes king. See the Poundbury Fire Station for me evidence of his architecture tomfoolery.
Lets not all feel so bad for Richard Rogers and the state of London Architecture. The project was not very good - Rogers still got paid a fee in the range of £10-20 million. Let us not forget that Rogers, Foster etc... are all part of an architectural elite almost as firmly entrenched as the royal elite. The benefits of this are that there will be an architectural competition, which may produce better and more interesting effects. The other possible side effect could be that the land is sold for a significant loss (it was bought for a fortune) and that the new developers can take advantage of this by building less densely, which is the main problem for any design on the site. High land prices and a forced proportion of affordable housing doesn't make great architecture from a business standpoint.
hillandrock, i gotta say after living in london and working there as an architect that your vision of the city is entirely different from my own. the city is alive. compare it to milan for example, which i love visiting but couldn't stand living. it is a sad mausoleum when it comes to the architecture. london escapes that fate by not being overly protective of its questionable heritage...
anyway, rogers' project was not nice. prince charles' boyfriend's project is also rather poor, but decorated with a different kind of fancy pudding. charles was attacking the style rather than the substance, and hence missed the opportunity to do anything useful.
I feel badly for Lord Rogers and his team. It's devastating to work so hard on a project for so long and have your client change their mind.
However, Prince Charles was perfectly within his rights to speak out against a project that he believes is wrong for London. That's what people who care about their environment should do. I share many of his concerns about that project. I think it a mischaracterization to say that for Charles, it only about the style. The priorities should be about creating good public spaces, good streets, and creating buildings that relate to their neighbors is a sensitive and respectful way... not in Starchitects creating aggressively individualistic statements. In every good city, the the city is more important than the building.
Modern architecture can achieve these goals, but historically it's done a rather poor job of it IMHO.
"The priorities should be about creating good public spaces, good streets, and creating buildings that relate to their neighbors is a sensitive and respectful way..."
There is plenty of 20th and now 21st century architecture that does just that...and I'm not going to sit here and list projects, but not every modern housing development, for instance, is brutal high rises set amidst dead grass. I think it very much is about style, or more correctly nostalgia, for the prince: his idea of England is country mansions set in idyllic tracts of land and old Cotswolds villages...which are fine but have nothing to do with whether a particular modern project is worthy or not...
I might add that public sentiment in England on the Chelsea project is running over two-to-one in favor of Charles' viewpoint, from what I understand
The developers are big boys. If they elt strongly about the matter, they could have carried on with the Rogers proposal. There is no evidence that I've seen that Charles used anything beyond a persuasive argument from a bully pulpit to sway them.
What you call "nostalgia" may simply be the recognition by Charles and others that there are demonstrable qualities about vernacular architecture in England that create great urban environments, and frankly speak to people in ways that much modern design simply does not.
"I might add that public sentiment in England on the Chelsea project is running over two-to-one in favor of Charles' viewpoint, from what I understand"
But the English are content with living in mock tudor/edwardian/victorian/georgian etc. etc. They like the modcons inside, but want their new builds to look as if it has just materialised from the 1800's.
They are content to live in a fairytale. I think Alain de Botton's work in the Architecture of Happiness is fascinating in the account of this.
Diabase - I could turn the argument around and say that the moderns are content in living in mock 1930's Bauhaus utopian worker housing.
I don't look at architectural style that way. I think that style is a language, one that practitioners use to map meaning into the built environments they design. In that sense I don't believe that we necessarily need to create a new language every generation in order to make environments that make people's live better, anymore than as a novelist I would need to create a new language in order to write a good story that is meaningful to a new generation of readers.
What you call a "fairytale" I'd call a living tradition. Traditions that have stood the test of time have the benefit of a consensus in a society. Traditional languages are understandable by a majority of laypeople, and thus can communicate to the users fluently and articulately. New languages can do this as well, but the task is much harder because there is less societal consensus.
Yea, whatever, EKE, defend him all you like, but the guy wouldn't know a good modern project if it crept up behind him and bit him in the ass, and that's because he refuses to even look or consider any design approach that didn't exist before the motor car: to me that's a blind prejudice like any other, and totally useless to any constructive conversation on how to make good places and buildings. And bully pulpit is right, because he is a bully about it.
You could turn the argument around - however, in terms of scale the modernists are a minority and the effects are limited [ok, you could argue that brutalist architecture has effects well beyond the envelope], but when virtually all new mass-housing developments in england are "faux 'insert style here'", its questionable.
The argument, in language terms, is fine. But there is nothing to learn in using an existing language, and particularly when that language is superficial and removed from the original influences under which it was created.
This kind of stylistic approach is microns thin. There is no rigour or analysis in the mass developments. Terry and others may engage in the idea of placemaking and urbanism, but the mockers dont and the mockers are responsible for the majority of work.
I could be cynical and say that faux-? as a style is employed by developers and architects to 'grease the wheels' of the planning process, because they know there will be little objection - there is no argument to mount. Little objection, shorter planning times, less financial costs, familiar product, less risk.
It as the analysis of the language of style that led to deconstructivism which in turn pointed out a whole range of fallacies about traditional architecture.
However, I am not a deconstructivist, or a modernist for that matter. I believe in rigour, good argument and good architecture. This is about due process being royally screwed - quite literally, or perhaps, sylistically.
Why is it when modernists design in the style nearly indistinguishable from Corbusier or Gropius, circa 1940, (See Architectural Record Homes 2009, for example) they are considered somehow "forward thinking" or "cutting edge", but designing in a style reminiscent of, say, John Russell Pope or Stanford White is somehow "faux". This delusion of the avant-guard is amusing to me. :)
QUOTE: "This kind of stylistic approach is microns thin. There is no rigour or analysis in the mass developments. Terry and others may engage in the idea of placemaking and urbanism, but the mockers dont and the mockers are responsible for the majority of work."
Couldn't disagree more. There are many, many outstanding architects working in languages other than modernist ones, and their work is every bit as rigorous and analytical.
In my opinion, the biggest reason we see so much miserable traditional architecture built today is because the modernist stranglehold on architectural education has stamped out nearly all thoughtful education in classical design. Before the 1920s, every architect received meaningful training in classical proportion, symmetry, detailing. When Mies and Gropius came to the US in the 20's, their influence severed that link to the continuity of architectural tradition.
Most American towns are filled with lovely, well proportioned, well detailed builder's houses designed in the 1920s and 30's by architects trained before the Bauhaus. Compare those to typical builder's tract housing today. In part, you can thank Gropius for those miserable buildings. :) His influence gutted the education system that would have culminated is better traditional design, and then his intellectual heirs point to the inevitable result of the process with derision.
QUOTE: "Little objection, shorter planning times, less financial costs, familiar product, less risk."
Should we as architects be striving to produce work that people object to? Should we be producing work that is more expensive, or alien? If modernism is so sensible, so right, so inevitable, why is it so unpopular with so many, other than the architect "true believers"?
I was trained as a modernist, and I still design many modern buildings. But for me, the two-proposition logic of "modern" or "traditional" seems so superficial. To me, is more about "both/and" rather than "either/or"
Mmm, delicious modernism. how many riots has the place caused since it was built in 1967? Oh yeah, 11. How many people does it pigeon hole? 4000. Who originally designed it? Le Corbusier.
I don't think you can get any more modern than this place. Unfortunately, it is a mega shithole.
Before you argue the figures of how it is doing now, this place has been effectively redeveloped... not once, not twice but four times. Read up on Alice Coleman... especially her book "Utopia on trial"... her book basically documents that modernism and oppression are often one in the same. That most large housing projects-- the majority of which are in the modernist style-- were highly unsuccessful.
This hasn't been screwed royally... nor is this new. Britians have been fighting modernist housing developments since the Thatcher Era... in fact, Charles is just reinforcing the trend and the notion that these developments are cultural matchstick constructions.
Jump and EKE said what I wanted to say better.
Vernacular architecture that is made today is no more phony than when it was first built. I can't imagine what people said when England rapidly shifted from Gothic architecture to Tudor architecture. We can say that England's older and more fortified architecture probably had a lot to due with Viking invasion and that the Tudor style was more or less letting their shields down.
It may have more or less might have had to do with the plague. In fact, I've been wondering how much modernism has to do with the Spanish Influenza outbreak in 1918-1919?!
Vernacular architecture is also expensive... or perceived to be... because we no longer have the molds, sculptors or artisans around to make the 'glued on' pastiche it requires.
Hell, how many companies still make zinc panel buildings?
Before you argue the figures of how it is doing now, this place has been effectively redeveloped... not once, not twice but four times. Read up on Alice Coleman... especially her book "Utopia on trial"... her book basically documents that modernism and oppression are often one in the same. That most large housing projects-- the majority of which are in the modernist style-- were highly unsuccessful.
And the slums that were there for 1000 years had thatch roofs and were timber framed. So what? They were shit holes too. You can do neither with the current building code. You have to paste on the timbers because they have to be fire protected. You cannot do unreinforced masonry either like Stanford White did.
This project is in a very expensive neighborhood. It's not a slum. And to boil it down to a style question is missing the point.
if you put a bunch of poor people in some kind of gothic-looking-ish building and called it a phalinstere you would not do better than in a modernist building. the problem is social not architectural. this is old question and long since settled. the straw dummies being proposed by both sides above are not useful...
super-planner, the great Sir peter hall talked about this issue in the 60's and his arguments have only been reinforced since then... and it goes something like this : style in architecture is irrelevant to society except as far as it offers a place to stand from.
rogers' project sucked because the developers bought the land at inflated prices and in order to get a reasonable yield were required to increase density to insane levels. charle's boytoy, terry whatsisname did a version as well, and it sucks just as bad. saw them both described on blog somewhere if anyone feels like testing their google-powers...
anyway, my guess is that right now the financing for this project doesn't make sense and that is why it was stopped. charles is prolly not really a major player in that decision.
just personally, mind but as an architect my own view is that style is only important to people of last generation who think the world is black or white and who think social issues are reducible to design problems. very old fashioned way of thinking in my mind, and good way to set yourself up as a rather poor architect in my opinion...
richard rogers tracks the later miesian trail of modernism rather than the middle corbusian. the consequential humanly disenfraching associations of raw concrete brutalism + interstitial spaces = poverty within mega projects do not apply here; professional corporatey upper middle class associations do...and hence roger's defense on that account. perhaps because glazed curtain walls were expensive and a sign of prestige. also, for an icon of modernism in architecture and urban design, it seems to me that mies did not seem to conceptually take into account urban density....or even inhabitants (he preferred architectural photos without people in the mise-en-scène)..unlike corbusier, who seemed intent on creating an architectural rubik cube envcapsulating urban Density with a capital D.
n any case, neither the associations of concrete nor the glass nor the bricks or the style are as potent in its capacity to be disenfranching as the underlying policy of what goes there and who goes there (and who doesn't)...this would reaffirm or challenge associations. that it would be a matter of style for prince charles makes him come across as trivial, in a powerful monarchy way.
rendering associations concrete denies concrete a rerendering of its associations.
Did anyone know that when Terry was planning the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, and had finally received all permits and was ready to start, that Lord Rogers used his considerable influence to try to stop the project, and wrote write to the Deputy Prime Minister asking him to call in the plans?
hillandrock, are you really comparing Rogers' project to slum developments? Have you even looked at Prince Charles' friend's project, or are you creating an argument for the sake of it?
I'm comparing the English perception of modernist architecture to Roger's project. Not all modernist projects are slums but all slums are modernist projects-- at least in London.
"Style in architecture is irrelevant to society except as far as it offers a place to stand from."
I would say this idea is wholly retarded since "style" in architecture requires special materials, construction techniques and education.
There's a lot of environmental considerations that are no longer "up for discussion." There is also the issue of geopolitics... I'm sure one could safely assume that the procurement of raw materials has been a source of geopolitical destabilization in certain parts of the world-- like bauxite (aluminum) and rutile (titanium).
As far as education and technique goes, some of the materials and construction styles necessary to build contemporary are beyond the ability and comprehension of the lay man. For instance, materials like aluminum can't be welded without a shielding gas.
Is style so irrelevant to society that we have dozens of collegiate level vocational programs that teach people strictly how to make the things of style? Is style so irrelevant that materials do not have an effect on the environment or their user? Is style so irrelevant that no one thinks any thing about them-- misconceptions or not?
Part of my argument is that Chelsea is super posh and that England is a country that's not sold entirely on modernism and in this society it is perfectly okay to chastise something if you just don't like it.
Also, there is nothing similar at all between Quinlan Terry's work and Richard Roger's work.
hillandrock. ok dude i lived and worked in london and can walked through slums (not sure how you define that word but lets just say it means a place where crime is constant and normal) that were decidedly not modernist. also went through council flats that scared the shit out of me, and a few that were beautiful.
i am not saying style is irrelevant, only that style has next to nothing to do with social problems.
by "place to stand from" i mean that style is a shortcut. it lets us table decisions and make headway on designs in a quick way so we don't have to spend time designing columns only think about where they are that sort of thing. style does not implicitly nor explicitly lead to a social solution on most any problem at all. at best it influences, but seldom directs...
as far as the chelsea project goes, the problem was not with the style but with the required density. neither rogers nor terry could make it work in satisfying way because the problems went well beyond stylistic ones. in the case of this particular example they are two sides of same coin and can be compared easily enough.
these are of course my biases. the ideas informed my phd in urban planning and are certainly controversial. i am not alone however. on other hand, i am not inclined to say the idea is moronic. nor are those of the other side. my partner in the office who runs our planning projects did his phd at same school as myself, but was trained before that by Speer (Jr., of course) in Germany. if you know what kind of work he does then you can imagine the gap in our basic views. and yet we have talks like this all the time without calling each other morons. of course there may come a time... ;-)
People need to distinguish between "modern" architecture and contemporary architecture. Modern architecture was a period of architectural history when Meis and Le Corbusier (among others) were alive and building. It probably extended from around the 1920s until maybe the 70s. As the 80s approached Post modernism reared its ugly head and since we have seen the rise of many various styles and still haven't quite settled on an appropriate label.
Rogers' architecture is not modern. It is more high tech contemporary. I don't know if there is a specific style name for his work but lets not clump it with Corbu's concrete housing towers, Meis's glass and steel towers, or the many housing projects that sprung up in cities and turned into slums.
Yes his design has been greatly influenced by these past styles and may be founded in the modern architectural movement but it would be wrong to call it modern architecture.
high tech contemporary? i thought it was high tech circa eighties. anyway, it seems to me that a lot of richard rogers architecture is explicitly about the interplay between structure and envelope and implicitly about inward reserved spatial neutrality and slick outward urban anonymity. intellectually and aesthetically, it is very much in the miesian track although it is more overt and is less potently ambiguous, being more anglo-pragmatic/pedantic. some, also in the miesian track, harness this ambiguity knowingly, like dominique perrault and jean nouvel, in place of structural and architectonic pedantics. yes, the dislocated ghost image haunting the sheen of modernist surfaces, glazed, naturalistic or otherwise.
He is more inline with Pierre Chareau and his glass house in Paris. He even uses the same color scheme. Chareau's stuff is much more "alive" than that of Mies. It's activated rather than pared down.
Mies was about "almost nothing", the only phrase that can be Roger's adds and articulates structure where Mies reduces it. Rogers shows off circulation and HVAC whereas Mies hides and neglects the latter to the point where you think he took it for granted. Mies was making the monuments of a new thousand year age called the Mass Age by his friend Guardini. Simplicity is one of the defining attributes of the beginning of any new historical period, according to the pop-Hegelianism of 1920s Berlin. If you don't believe me, check out the books from Mies's at the library at UIC. He goes ga-ga all over what Guardini had to say. Rogers has his own ideas own ideas about modernity but they are much broader than Mies's.
Think about lighting and Mies. There isn't any in the Farnsworth house save for the bathrooms. He has planned for floor lamps. His apartment buildings have cast-in-place recessed lighting. I don't know about Rogers's lighting preferences.
One thing that Rogers and Mies have in common is that the act of Architecture is a choice. For Mies, it was between chaos and order. This is why he so loved being in charge of an Architecture school. He could show impressionable young minds the way to the future, a thousand year age characterized by high technology as a tool to realize spiritual goals such as a renewed connection to nature. For Rogers, it is similar. Do we want to live in the 21st century? Some of you call him an 80s architect. I don't think it's helpful. I used to think that about Johnson but even Johnson is a lot more complex than that. It is more about being able to make choices given the constraints of the situation and the available options. The most amazing Architects are the ones that take small budgets and unpromising jobs and make something compelling out of them. Rogers is a moralist like Mies in that he considers the Architect as a choice maker that sides with the good and the great. The ends are different though. Charles is similar but he has never worked through anything and doesn't realize that a blank sheet of paper is what a lot of great projects started with be they gothic cathedrals or modern, flexible housing. Architecture is a rich art and I hope that better jobs are encouraged and nurtured and unpromising ones can be cultivated into something better.
Another point of view on the Chelsea Barracks tempest-in-a teapot. Apparently, Charles' critique wasn't the only reason to reject the Rogers scheme:
"Rogers blamed (Charles) for "single-handedly" stopping his scheme, thus raising ghosts of republicanism and incurring the sympathy and outrage of fellow architects.
I am informed that the reality was rather different. Rogers had felt so confident of his influence in the corridors of London power that he produced a plan for the £1billion site which disregarded Westminster's planning brief so as to increase the profit for the luxury developers, the Candy brothers, then project partners of the Qataris.
The Candys have a Rogers apartment block under construction in the centre of Knightsbridge.
The planning brief stipulated no more than six storeys, in conformity to building heights in the neighbourhood, and banned glass, steel and plastic exterior surfaces, in favour of brick, stone and slate.
The brief for one of the largest residential schemes in inner London was that it should reflect the scale and style of adjacent Chelsea and Pimlico.
Rogers put in a proposal for a nine-storey block in his familiar glass and steel cladding. He initially overawed Westminster's planning officers and won their tentative approval at a steering committee last September.
But by the time the design was approaching the full planning committee last Thursday, a torrent of local opposition alerted councillors to the variations from the brief and made rejection almost certain.
It was the variation and local opposition, rather the intervention of the Prince of Wales, that led the Qataris to decide that discretion was the better part of valour and withdraw their plan before last week's meeting."
Did you hear what happened to Richard Rogers? Where's Oliver Cromwell when you need him? ;-)
Rogers had a fantastic project pulled out from under him ostensibly by a disfavorable letter from Prince Charles to the client.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/jun/16/richard-rogers-prince-charles-architecture
Last Friday at 9am, the phone rang at Richard Rogers's hi-tech office by the Thames at Hammersmith, west London. On the line was an aide to Qatar's royal family, the architect's client on a multibillion pound housing project on the site of the former Chelsea barracks.
The news was not good. After two and a half years of design work and days before expecting to win planning permission, the award-winning firm was sacked. The royal aide told Rogers a press statement would be released within an hour. Rogers desperately argued his corner, trying to persuade the Qataris they were making a mistake, but he could tell the game was up.
His name was never mentioned, but everyone knew: Prince Charles had struck again; and for the third time in his long career Rogers was left to come to terms with the Prince of Wales wrecking his projects.
"It knocked the stuffing out of me, and the design team even more," Rogers said , in his first interview since his sacking. "We had hoped that Prince Charles had retreated from his position on modern architecture, but he single-handedly destroyed this project."
i thought this could only happen in north korea or iran.
not surprising--Britain is unbelievably beholden to elites, tradition and class structure. You can get hardly more elite than a crown prince, and in such a traditional-minded society, the whims of a crown prince hold a lot of sway.
No offense... I mean the Chelsea Barracks weren't necessarily a pretty site but there is nothing "London" about that site. I mean you can argue what "London" means and all that jazz but England has notably suffered under the intrusion of modernist architecture.
I know this brings up contention but anyone who has watched 45 minutes of the BBC knows that modernist architecture and poverty go hand-in-hand. Frankly, the new fancy stuff was the tool of a highly active government between the 60s to the 90s filling up the country with tons of modernist "housing estates" that have done little to nothing other than be slightly more successful than American housing projects.
Furthermore, the aesthetics of a building are one of the few things citizens whole-heatedly support in terms of planning. Why? I do not entirely know but this is something that everyone (with a voice) seems to want government to actually do.
Furthermore, It's not your country. It's not the people's country. It is Queen Mum's country. She owns... what 85% of the island? If you want to talk about personal freedoms and property rights... I wouldn't because she can exercise her property rights. She also holds the power to dissolve the government at any moment.
Case in point... the Millennium Dome.
WORST THING EVER.
here's what's next for Rogers:
axe-specially if he's catholic or irish...
I think that would be the Prince instead!
hillandrock: The Queen Mother is dead...Besides that, no one in the Royal Family owns anywhere close to 85% of all the land in the country. The Forestry Commission and the MoD own more. However, this is not to say that there are not huge land management issues in the UK, because there are.
Charles should shut his mouth, he is a nonce, but (unfortunately) lots of people listen to him. There was a program on food a while back, stimulated by Charles' attack on fast food. They revealed that his Duchy Cornish Pasty had way more fat and sugar than a Big Mac meal and cost more. He is an outdated hypocrite and a buffoon and I hope that for some reason or other he never becomes king. See the Poundbury Fire Station for me evidence of his architecture tomfoolery.
Lets not all feel so bad for Richard Rogers and the state of London Architecture. The project was not very good - Rogers still got paid a fee in the range of £10-20 million. Let us not forget that Rogers, Foster etc... are all part of an architectural elite almost as firmly entrenched as the royal elite. The benefits of this are that there will be an architectural competition, which may produce better and more interesting effects. The other possible side effect could be that the land is sold for a significant loss (it was bought for a fortune) and that the new developers can take advantage of this by building less densely, which is the main problem for any design on the site. High land prices and a forced proportion of affordable housing doesn't make great architecture from a business standpoint.
But the difference is that Foster and Rogers earned their status. They know something!
hillandrock, i gotta say after living in london and working there as an architect that your vision of the city is entirely different from my own. the city is alive. compare it to milan for example, which i love visiting but couldn't stand living. it is a sad mausoleum when it comes to the architecture. london escapes that fate by not being overly protective of its questionable heritage...
anyway, rogers' project was not nice. prince charles' boyfriend's project is also rather poor, but decorated with a different kind of fancy pudding. charles was attacking the style rather than the substance, and hence missed the opportunity to do anything useful.
the recent article in the guardian summed it up for me pretty well though. only older generation still think these kinds of questions are relevant to our business anymore. the world has moved on and we are frankly better architects for it.
i like his clear plastic glasses!
bring back alison and peter!!!
my NewModelArmy!
That's great!!!!
I feel badly for Lord Rogers and his team. It's devastating to work so hard on a project for so long and have your client change their mind.
However, Prince Charles was perfectly within his rights to speak out against a project that he believes is wrong for London. That's what people who care about their environment should do. I share many of his concerns about that project. I think it a mischaracterization to say that for Charles, it only about the style. The priorities should be about creating good public spaces, good streets, and creating buildings that relate to their neighbors is a sensitive and respectful way... not in Starchitects creating aggressively individualistic statements. In every good city, the the city is more important than the building.
Modern architecture can achieve these goals, but historically it's done a rather poor job of it IMHO.
"However, Prince Charles was perfectly within his rights to speak out against a project that he believes is wrong for London."
Of course. But to then make a few phone calls and use his power to stop a project is a different matter.
"The priorities should be about creating good public spaces, good streets, and creating buildings that relate to their neighbors is a sensitive and respectful way..."
There is plenty of 20th and now 21st century architecture that does just that...and I'm not going to sit here and list projects, but not every modern housing development, for instance, is brutal high rises set amidst dead grass. I think it very much is about style, or more correctly nostalgia, for the prince: his idea of England is country mansions set in idyllic tracts of land and old Cotswolds villages...which are fine but have nothing to do with whether a particular modern project is worthy or not...
and what diabase said above.
I might add that public sentiment in England on the Chelsea project is running over two-to-one in favor of Charles' viewpoint, from what I understand
The developers are big boys. If they elt strongly about the matter, they could have carried on with the Rogers proposal. There is no evidence that I've seen that Charles used anything beyond a persuasive argument from a bully pulpit to sway them.
What you call "nostalgia" may simply be the recognition by Charles and others that there are demonstrable qualities about vernacular architecture in England that create great urban environments, and frankly speak to people in ways that much modern design simply does not.
"I might add that public sentiment in England on the Chelsea project is running over two-to-one in favor of Charles' viewpoint, from what I understand"
But the English are content with living in mock tudor/edwardian/victorian/georgian etc. etc. They like the modcons inside, but want their new builds to look as if it has just materialised from the 1800's.
They are content to live in a fairytale. I think Alain de Botton's work in the Architecture of Happiness is fascinating in the account of this.
Diabase - I could turn the argument around and say that the moderns are content in living in mock 1930's Bauhaus utopian worker housing.
I don't look at architectural style that way. I think that style is a language, one that practitioners use to map meaning into the built environments they design. In that sense I don't believe that we necessarily need to create a new language every generation in order to make environments that make people's live better, anymore than as a novelist I would need to create a new language in order to write a good story that is meaningful to a new generation of readers.
What you call a "fairytale" I'd call a living tradition. Traditions that have stood the test of time have the benefit of a consensus in a society. Traditional languages are understandable by a majority of laypeople, and thus can communicate to the users fluently and articulately. New languages can do this as well, but the task is much harder because there is less societal consensus.
Yea, whatever, EKE, defend him all you like, but the guy wouldn't know a good modern project if it crept up behind him and bit him in the ass, and that's because he refuses to even look or consider any design approach that didn't exist before the motor car: to me that's a blind prejudice like any other, and totally useless to any constructive conversation on how to make good places and buildings. And bully pulpit is right, because he is a bully about it.
Yes,
You could turn the argument around - however, in terms of scale the modernists are a minority and the effects are limited [ok, you could argue that brutalist architecture has effects well beyond the envelope], but when virtually all new mass-housing developments in england are "faux 'insert style here'", its questionable.
The argument, in language terms, is fine. But there is nothing to learn in using an existing language, and particularly when that language is superficial and removed from the original influences under which it was created.
This kind of stylistic approach is microns thin. There is no rigour or analysis in the mass developments. Terry and others may engage in the idea of placemaking and urbanism, but the mockers dont and the mockers are responsible for the majority of work.
I could be cynical and say that faux-? as a style is employed by developers and architects to 'grease the wheels' of the planning process, because they know there will be little objection - there is no argument to mount. Little objection, shorter planning times, less financial costs, familiar product, less risk.
It as the analysis of the language of style that led to deconstructivism which in turn pointed out a whole range of fallacies about traditional architecture.
However, I am not a deconstructivist, or a modernist for that matter. I believe in rigour, good argument and good architecture. This is about due process being royally screwed - quite literally, or perhaps, sylistically.
Why is it when modernists design in the style nearly indistinguishable from Corbusier or Gropius, circa 1940, (See Architectural Record Homes 2009, for example) they are considered somehow "forward thinking" or "cutting edge", but designing in a style reminiscent of, say, John Russell Pope or Stanford White is somehow "faux". This delusion of the avant-guard is amusing to me. :)
QUOTE: "This kind of stylistic approach is microns thin. There is no rigour or analysis in the mass developments. Terry and others may engage in the idea of placemaking and urbanism, but the mockers dont and the mockers are responsible for the majority of work."
Couldn't disagree more. There are many, many outstanding architects working in languages other than modernist ones, and their work is every bit as rigorous and analytical.
In my opinion, the biggest reason we see so much miserable traditional architecture built today is because the modernist stranglehold on architectural education has stamped out nearly all thoughtful education in classical design. Before the 1920s, every architect received meaningful training in classical proportion, symmetry, detailing. When Mies and Gropius came to the US in the 20's, their influence severed that link to the continuity of architectural tradition.
Most American towns are filled with lovely, well proportioned, well detailed builder's houses designed in the 1920s and 30's by architects trained before the Bauhaus. Compare those to typical builder's tract housing today. In part, you can thank Gropius for those miserable buildings. :) His influence gutted the education system that would have culminated is better traditional design, and then his intellectual heirs point to the inevitable result of the process with derision.
QUOTE: "Little objection, shorter planning times, less financial costs, familiar product, less risk."
Should we as architects be striving to produce work that people object to? Should we be producing work that is more expensive, or alien? If modernism is so sensible, so right, so inevitable, why is it so unpopular with so many, other than the architect "true believers"?
I was trained as a modernist, and I still design many modern buildings. But for me, the two-proposition logic of "modern" or "traditional" seems so superficial. To me, is more about "both/and" rather than "either/or"
An alternate view: Who's really the bully?
http://massengale.typepad.com/venustas/2009/04/lord-rogers-bully-boy.html
Mmm, delicious modernism. how many riots has the place caused since it was built in 1967? Oh yeah, 11. How many people does it pigeon hole? 4000. Who originally designed it? Le Corbusier.
I don't think you can get any more modern than this place. Unfortunately, it is a mega shithole.
Before you argue the figures of how it is doing now, this place has been effectively redeveloped... not once, not twice but four times. Read up on Alice Coleman... especially her book "Utopia on trial"... her book basically documents that modernism and oppression are often one in the same. That most large housing projects-- the majority of which are in the modernist style-- were highly unsuccessful.
This hasn't been screwed royally... nor is this new. Britians have been fighting modernist housing developments since the Thatcher Era... in fact, Charles is just reinforcing the trend and the notion that these developments are cultural matchstick constructions.
Jump and EKE said what I wanted to say better.
Vernacular architecture that is made today is no more phony than when it was first built. I can't imagine what people said when England rapidly shifted from Gothic architecture to Tudor architecture. We can say that England's older and more fortified architecture probably had a lot to due with Viking invasion and that the Tudor style was more or less letting their shields down.
It may have more or less might have had to do with the plague. In fact, I've been wondering how much modernism has to do with the Spanish Influenza outbreak in 1918-1919?!
Vernacular architecture is also expensive... or perceived to be... because we no longer have the molds, sculptors or artisans around to make the 'glued on' pastiche it requires.
Hell, how many companies still make zinc panel buildings?
Sorry, my post refers to Broadwater Farm.
And the slums that were there for 1000 years had thatch roofs and were timber framed. So what? They were shit holes too. You can do neither with the current building code. You have to paste on the timbers because they have to be fire protected. You cannot do unreinforced masonry either like Stanford White did.
This project is in a very expensive neighborhood. It's not a slum. And to boil it down to a style question is missing the point.
if you put a bunch of poor people in some kind of gothic-looking-ish building and called it a phalinstere you would not do better than in a modernist building. the problem is social not architectural. this is old question and long since settled. the straw dummies being proposed by both sides above are not useful...
super-planner, the great Sir peter hall talked about this issue in the 60's and his arguments have only been reinforced since then... and it goes something like this : style in architecture is irrelevant to society except as far as it offers a place to stand from.
rogers' project sucked because the developers bought the land at inflated prices and in order to get a reasonable yield were required to increase density to insane levels. charle's boytoy, terry whatsisname did a version as well, and it sucks just as bad. saw them both described on blog somewhere if anyone feels like testing their google-powers...
anyway, my guess is that right now the financing for this project doesn't make sense and that is why it was stopped. charles is prolly not really a major player in that decision.
just personally, mind but as an architect my own view is that style is only important to people of last generation who think the world is black or white and who think social issues are reducible to design problems. very old fashioned way of thinking in my mind, and good way to set yourself up as a rather poor architect in my opinion...
richard rogers tracks the later miesian trail of modernism rather than the middle corbusian. the consequential humanly disenfraching associations of raw concrete brutalism + interstitial spaces = poverty within mega projects do not apply here; professional corporatey upper middle class associations do...and hence roger's defense on that account. perhaps because glazed curtain walls were expensive and a sign of prestige. also, for an icon of modernism in architecture and urban design, it seems to me that mies did not seem to conceptually take into account urban density....or even inhabitants (he preferred architectural photos without people in the mise-en-scène)..unlike corbusier, who seemed intent on creating an architectural rubik cube envcapsulating urban Density with a capital D.
n any case, neither the associations of concrete nor the glass nor the bricks or the style are as potent in its capacity to be disenfranching as the underlying policy of what goes there and who goes there (and who doesn't)...this would reaffirm or challenge associations. that it would be a matter of style for prince charles makes him come across as trivial, in a powerful monarchy way.
rendering associations concrete denies concrete a rerendering of its associations.
i wonder what music the prince listens to.
funny thing,,, richard rogers is a knight. how did that happen with all this tension?
Jump-
His name is Quinlan Terry.
Did anyone know that when Terry was planning the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, and had finally received all permits and was ready to start, that Lord Rogers used his considerable influence to try to stop the project, and wrote write to the Deputy Prime Minister asking him to call in the plans?
hillandrock, are you really comparing Rogers' project to slum developments? Have you even looked at Prince Charles' friend's project, or are you creating an argument for the sake of it?
I'm comparing the English perception of modernist architecture to Roger's project. Not all modernist projects are slums but all slums are modernist projects-- at least in London.
"Style in architecture is irrelevant to society except as far as it offers a place to stand from."
I would say this idea is wholly retarded since "style" in architecture requires special materials, construction techniques and education.
There's a lot of environmental considerations that are no longer "up for discussion." There is also the issue of geopolitics... I'm sure one could safely assume that the procurement of raw materials has been a source of geopolitical destabilization in certain parts of the world-- like bauxite (aluminum) and rutile (titanium).
As far as education and technique goes, some of the materials and construction styles necessary to build contemporary are beyond the ability and comprehension of the lay man. For instance, materials like aluminum can't be welded without a shielding gas.
Is style so irrelevant to society that we have dozens of collegiate level vocational programs that teach people strictly how to make the things of style? Is style so irrelevant that materials do not have an effect on the environment or their user? Is style so irrelevant that no one thinks any thing about them-- misconceptions or not?
Part of my argument is that Chelsea is super posh and that England is a country that's not sold entirely on modernism and in this society it is perfectly okay to chastise something if you just don't like it.
Also, there is nothing similar at all between Quinlan Terry's work and Richard Roger's work.
hillandrock. ok dude i lived and worked in london and can walked through slums (not sure how you define that word but lets just say it means a place where crime is constant and normal) that were decidedly not modernist. also went through council flats that scared the shit out of me, and a few that were beautiful.
i am not saying style is irrelevant, only that style has next to nothing to do with social problems.
by "place to stand from" i mean that style is a shortcut. it lets us table decisions and make headway on designs in a quick way so we don't have to spend time designing columns only think about where they are that sort of thing. style does not implicitly nor explicitly lead to a social solution on most any problem at all. at best it influences, but seldom directs...
as far as the chelsea project goes, the problem was not with the style but with the required density. neither rogers nor terry could make it work in satisfying way because the problems went well beyond stylistic ones. in the case of this particular example they are two sides of same coin and can be compared easily enough.
these are of course my biases. the ideas informed my phd in urban planning and are certainly controversial. i am not alone however. on other hand, i am not inclined to say the idea is moronic. nor are those of the other side. my partner in the office who runs our planning projects did his phd at same school as myself, but was trained before that by Speer (Jr., of course) in Germany. if you know what kind of work he does then you can imagine the gap in our basic views. and yet we have talks like this all the time without calling each other morons. of course there may come a time... ;-)
People need to distinguish between "modern" architecture and contemporary architecture. Modern architecture was a period of architectural history when Meis and Le Corbusier (among others) were alive and building. It probably extended from around the 1920s until maybe the 70s. As the 80s approached Post modernism reared its ugly head and since we have seen the rise of many various styles and still haven't quite settled on an appropriate label.
Rogers' architecture is not modern. It is more high tech contemporary. I don't know if there is a specific style name for his work but lets not clump it with Corbu's concrete housing towers, Meis's glass and steel towers, or the many housing projects that sprung up in cities and turned into slums.
Yes his design has been greatly influenced by these past styles and may be founded in the modern architectural movement but it would be wrong to call it modern architecture.
high tech contemporary? i thought it was high tech circa eighties. anyway, it seems to me that a lot of richard rogers architecture is explicitly about the interplay between structure and envelope and implicitly about inward reserved spatial neutrality and slick outward urban anonymity. intellectually and aesthetically, it is very much in the miesian track although it is more overt and is less potently ambiguous, being more anglo-pragmatic/pedantic. some, also in the miesian track, harness this ambiguity knowingly, like dominique perrault and jean nouvel, in place of structural and architectonic pedantics. yes, the dislocated ghost image haunting the sheen of modernist surfaces, glazed, naturalistic or otherwise.
well put.
When did you live in London jump?
Roger's is a Miesian? In what way?
He is more inline with Pierre Chareau and his glass house in Paris. He even uses the same color scheme. Chareau's stuff is much more "alive" than that of Mies. It's activated rather than pared down.
Mies was about "almost nothing", the only phrase that can be Roger's adds and articulates structure where Mies reduces it. Rogers shows off circulation and HVAC whereas Mies hides and neglects the latter to the point where you think he took it for granted. Mies was making the monuments of a new thousand year age called the Mass Age by his friend Guardini. Simplicity is one of the defining attributes of the beginning of any new historical period, according to the pop-Hegelianism of 1920s Berlin. If you don't believe me, check out the books from Mies's at the library at UIC. He goes ga-ga all over what Guardini had to say. Rogers has his own ideas own ideas about modernity but they are much broader than Mies's.
That is the only phrase that can be attributed to Mies...
Think about lighting and Mies. There isn't any in the Farnsworth house save for the bathrooms. He has planned for floor lamps. His apartment buildings have cast-in-place recessed lighting. I don't know about Rogers's lighting preferences.
One thing that Rogers and Mies have in common is that the act of Architecture is a choice. For Mies, it was between chaos and order. This is why he so loved being in charge of an Architecture school. He could show impressionable young minds the way to the future, a thousand year age characterized by high technology as a tool to realize spiritual goals such as a renewed connection to nature. For Rogers, it is similar. Do we want to live in the 21st century? Some of you call him an 80s architect. I don't think it's helpful. I used to think that about Johnson but even Johnson is a lot more complex than that. It is more about being able to make choices given the constraints of the situation and the available options. The most amazing Architects are the ones that take small budgets and unpromising jobs and make something compelling out of them. Rogers is a moralist like Mies in that he considers the Architect as a choice maker that sides with the good and the great. The ends are different though. Charles is similar but he has never worked through anything and doesn't realize that a blank sheet of paper is what a lot of great projects started with be they gothic cathedrals or modern, flexible housing. Architecture is a rich art and I hope that better jobs are encouraged and nurtured and unpromising ones can be cultivated into something better.
Another point of view on the Chelsea Barracks tempest-in-a teapot. Apparently, Charles' critique wasn't the only reason to reject the Rogers scheme:
"Rogers blamed (Charles) for "single-handedly" stopping his scheme, thus raising ghosts of republicanism and incurring the sympathy and outrage of fellow architects.
I am informed that the reality was rather different. Rogers had felt so confident of his influence in the corridors of London power that he produced a plan for the £1billion site which disregarded Westminster's planning brief so as to increase the profit for the luxury developers, the Candy brothers, then project partners of the Qataris.
The Candys have a Rogers apartment block under construction in the centre of Knightsbridge.
The planning brief stipulated no more than six storeys, in conformity to building heights in the neighbourhood, and banned glass, steel and plastic exterior surfaces, in favour of brick, stone and slate.
The brief for one of the largest residential schemes in inner London was that it should reflect the scale and style of adjacent Chelsea and Pimlico.
Rogers put in a proposal for a nine-storey block in his familiar glass and steel cladding. He initially overawed Westminster's planning officers and won their tentative approval at a steering committee last September.
But by the time the design was approaching the full planning committee last Thursday, a torrent of local opposition alerted councillors to the variations from the brief and made rejection almost certain.
It was the variation and local opposition, rather the intervention of the Prince of Wales, that led the Qataris to decide that discretion was the better part of valour and withdraw their plan before last week's meeting."
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23710841-details/After+the+Chelsea+barracks+banter,+can+we+get+back+to+the+brief/article.do
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