A trio of concerned letter writers replied to a March 31st opinion piece by The Guardian’s Owen Hatherley in which the critic declared that “hardline modern architecture is now something of a cult.”

“A living city has to strike some sort of balance between avoiding the strangulation and depopulation that happens when you conserve everything, and the visual slurry that occurs if you let developers do what they like,” Hatherley wrote. “The result has been a new tension between different notions of conservation. This is a tension that serves mainly to benefit property developers, who can make money both from new buildings, and as 'saviors' of great modern buildings at the cost of destroying their original purely social purpose, as has happened in the privatisation of London’s Keeling House or Sheffield’s Park Hill.”

The Twentieth Century Society’s London Director Catherine Croft shared her agreement with Hatherley’s assessment, remarking on the current state of conservation schemes and citing a recent push within the country toward adaptive reuse projects as evidenced by the updated Barbican redevelopment (among many others).

“[He] is right that our cities will only flourish if we get the balance right between conserving everything and giving developers a free-for-all,” Croft responded in her letter to The Guardian. “In fact, conservation is now pretty broad-minded and has got over the fact that many of the outstanding modernist buildings now listed sit on top of the rubble of great Victorian ones […] Now that we understand the impact of demolition on climate change, there is all the more reason to prioritize reusing structures on environmental grounds — there are still plenty of sites for new masterpieces (only 2% of building stock is listed). As with cherished buildings of previous eras, the best 20th-century examples deserve gentle conservation. We should stop trashing our modernist heritage.”

Conversely, an opponent of modernism’s “large-scale blitzkrieg of urban centers and communities” pointed to habitability challenges commonly associated with most modernist structures as a possible point of oversight on the part of Hatherley, whom he accused of being desperately out of touch. 

“The problem with [his] plea for preserving the modernist buildings of the 1960s and 70s is that at almost no point does he mention the people who have to live or work in them,” Southampton resident Garth Groombridge opined in his letter. “While no one would dispute that towns and cities need to evolve, the reality is that many examples of modernism were plonked down without regard to history, geography, local materials or traditions, or to the practicalities of everyday life.”