Jonathan Glancey,
(Guardian UK) Our cities are being overrun by Jack-the-lad architecture, with the blessing of the media and politicians. link
This is Architecture Week, a time to consider the wealth and wonder of our built world. In Britain today, our wealth is pumped into and expressed by an ever-increasing number of priapic schemes, real, projected and plain silly, for office towers that shoot their laddish loads high into our city skies uncritically supported by media, mayors and money men.
Hey, look, everyone, my tower's 500 feet tall. That's nothing, sonny boy; mine's 1,000. A thousand? Get serious, kiddo, I've got a 1,500-foot tower in my pocket. Know what I mean?
This weeing-up-the-wall architecture - designed and commissioned by those old enough to know better and given the nod by politicians and the wink by journalists - is coming to a city centre near you soon.
Should you find such Jack-the-lad design over-the-top, you will be offered screwball design instead. Presented as what-the-people-want in a "down-with-the-kids" manner, such playschool architecture - a dolly-mixture, of spotty, sugar-candy blobs, whirls and splodges - is designed, we are told, to challenge and redress the mufti of our tedious town - and crusty city-centres.
Both pricks and blobs are supported not only by big business, wannabe streetwise politicians and a sensation-hungry media, but by those nominally charged with looking after architecture and urban design in our name.
Only last week, an independent inquiry reported on the clash of interests at the heart of Cabe, the government's Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. Sir Stuart Lipton, a property developer and Cabe's energetic first chairman, resigned in response to the report's findings. It was felt that Cabe has been too close to Sir Stuart's property company, Stanhope.
In fact several of Cabe's directors are on Stanhope's payroll, while others have business interests that could just possibly encourage lesser professionals than they to favour certain architectural projects over others. Neither Cabe nor its trustees are accused of impropriety, yet it has been hard to disassociate this New Labour quango from the concerns of big business and property development.
The truth is that Cabe is exactly the right architectural watchdog for New Britain, just as ambitious new offices in the guise of spotty blobs and prickly towers are ideal designs for our cities. Why? Because we are deeply, madly in love with money and fame, and these buildings are, increasingly, media-grabbing machines for making money. And, however hard we find to admit it, this is what most of us want: the kind of money that can offer us greater freedom of choice, ever bigger homes, cars with more gadgets, as-seen-on-TV food, branded goods and just more stuff generally, which has to be a good thing, doesn't it?
Every society, it is said, gets the architecture it deserves, and, so, I suppose we should be cheering from the chilled-out roof-gardens of our zig-zag new apartment blocks as our cities begin to resemble these universal aspirations in three painfully fashionable dimensions.
By the same logic, we will get bored with blobs, dissatisfied with towers in the shapes of carrots, cucumbers or prize marrows, just as, one day, we will get bored with the sheer amount of stuff cluttering up our homes. Does this matter? Nah. Just as the Romans might have said, "Forget the Parthenon, the Pantheon's in", ensuing generations (cooler, richer, hipper and more into popular culture than we can even dream of) will simply build a fresh load of weird, computer-generated money-making stuff. And then get bored with that.
And yet, what if, just for a moment during Architecture Week, we stopped and thought seriously about the world we are making in concrete, glass and steel. What, for example, if we were to get bored with pure sensation and sheer novelty, and crave civility, good manners and intelligence in new architecture instead? What then?
If you look hard enough, you will discover many British architects and those working with them, whether as engineers or clients, including developers and local authorities, working thoughtfully, and sometimes lyrically, on the design of the places we live, love and work in. There is, too, a place for well-designed and even flamboyant towers as there always has been from the ziggurats of Mesopotamia and the spiral minaret at Samarra, to the highly charged temples of Cambodia, their frankly erotic counterparts in India, and on through medieval cathedrals, renaissance domes and Manhattan skyscrapers to Foster's unforgettable, if controversial, 30 St Mary Axe - aka the gherkin - in the City of London today.
The design of buildings and the making of cities are difficult arts and uncertain skills, shot through with political ambition, economic juggling and cultural sensibilities. Neither is the stuff of in-out lists or here today-gone tomorrow chatter. Both require informed debate; an ever-deepening knowledge of history - architecture is a continuum - fewer publicity pranks and less willy-waving.
I have a feeling, though, that the sexed-up neophiliacs among us will disagree and go, all the way, for the blobs and pricks. For this week, anyway.
· Jonathan Glancey is the Guardian's architecture critic
[email protected]
No Comments
Block this user
Are you sure you want to block this user and hide all related comments throughout the site?
Archinect
This is your first comment on Archinect. Your comment will be visible once approved.