Steele considers the contribution made by the main architectural currents within the economical and cultural context, and assesses their future significance.

There is presently no coordinated public policy in Britain related to architecture, or to the arts in general for that matter: film, fashion, music, dance and the theatre suffer from the same degree of benign neglect. The debate that raged after the effectiveness of contemporary British architecture was questioned at the 150th anniversary ceremony of the Royal Institute of British Architects at Hampton Court in 1984 and which escalated precipitously with the famous ‘monstrous carbuncle’ speech about the Ahrends Burton Koralek scheme for the National Gallery extension in Trafalger Square soon afterwards, may be seen as being symptomatic of that vacuum. The demise of the Greater London Council (GLC), the successor to the London County Council that was orchestrated by Conservative fiat in 1985 is another symptom, more specifically of a pattern of municipal fragmentation caused by powerful market forces unleashed in the mid to late 1980s.
Since its creation in 1889, the London County Council, as one of the first capital authorities, implemented more public programmes than many other cities in Europe, including the bus service, the Underground, sanitary services, a police force and a park system that still contains more green space than any other city in the world. When the GLC was abolished, its responsibilities were redistributed between the City of London, 32 boroughs, five government departments and more than 60 committees. The result, according to Richard Rogers, who would like to see the GLC restored, is that ‘Londoners have no elected representation, no direct say in their cities affairs, no foil to counter the development of the city for profit alone’.1
Canary Wharf and the redevelopment of the Isle of Dogs has been widely criticized as one of the most misguided excesses of such market led consumerism. The substitution of the local statutory planning authority by the London Docklands Development Corporation, led to the displacement of a cohesive community which, while economically depressed, was more viable than the unbalanced mixture of offices and housing that replaced it. Property speculation has historically led to many of the most enduring contributions to London, such as Regent Street by John Nash and Covent Garden by the Duke of Bedford, the difference being that they were tempered by a sense of civic responsibility. The sheer greed and evident lack of concern for future generations, as well as the desire for a quick return on investment is what separates much present property development and the market forces behind it. This is arguably the only reliable constant as far as cultural policy is concerned in British architecture today.
Over the last decade, architecture has been used as a polemical device in the debate over the way such responsibility may be captured, if at all. The proposals put forward by classicists appear socially responsible by comparison to the Isle of Dogs. Classicism became a crusade in the mid 1980s and the Paternoster Square development in the City of London, of 1989, was a counterattack against the infidel modernists. First overseen by John Simpson, this attempt to restore the urban grain and pre-blitz street patterns around St. Paul’s as an alternative to Sir William Holford’s 1950s regimented slab blocks, itself contained 1/4 million square feet of commercial space and 3/4 million square feet of offices, but was more sensitively related to context than Canary Wharf. Terry Farrell, who replaced Simpson, increased commercial and retail office space to make it more financially viable without appreciably destroying that quality. Although it did not survive the bursting of the 80s bubble, Paternoster remains a compelling image showing that classicism can be once again harnessed by commerce, just as it was in the most memorable examples in Britain’s past. Farrell produced a contexturally responsible architecture capable of drawing popular support and proved that classicism can offer a consensual approach to intervening in the city by bringing together many different architects, in this case, besides Simpson and Farrell, Dimitri Porphyrios, Quinlan Terry, Robert Adam and Sidell Gibson from Britain and Allan Greenberg and Hammond Beeby Babka from America.
Poundbury, a suburban equivalent in Dorchester, has now been partially realized and is intended as an antidote to endemic suburban sprawl. Initiated by the Duchy of Cornwall in collaboration with local authorities, it has been planned as a continuation of traditional Dorset village patterns and community hierarchy, using a variety of street sizes, historical building types and local materials. Leon Krier has used village sized districts to control growth of a maximum of 100 acres each. Middle Farm, the first of four of these phased over the next decade, has 800 households, with streets that radiate out to connect to the existing Victoria Park suburb. Each of the villages of the same size has traffic channelled in boulevards between them to encourage pedestrian use, following new urbanist doctrine and mixed use to combat the separation caused by conventional zoning.
A constantly negative media barrage, fuelled by those who would like to see its sponsor fail, has ensured that the Poundbury experiment has had very little impact however, and a recent attempt to establish a similar community next to the Battersea Power station beside the Thames has been rejected by the Millennium Commission, partially because of such adverse criticism. Critics of the classicist crusade have consistently dismissed Poundbury, most recently as ‘cutsey’ and ‘an architectural confection that has done little or nothing to take the debate on the future of city life forward’, in spite of the fact that it conforms almost exactly to precepts of the New Urbanism, which is the first major breakthrough in urban planning since the Garden City model by Ebenezer Howard.2
The New Urbanists, who now have their own manifesto and a growing list of members with a zeal for social change not seen since the beginning of the modern movement, continue to make impressive progress on their concerted attacks on separatist zoning codes in the United States, but their proselytizing skill has attracted few converts in Britain. On the contrary, the lack of support for the approach taken at Poundbury indicates an ability to separate it from this important trend, to focus on the ‘period’ wrapper while denying the substance that it shares with an American counterpart.
Such denial, symptomatic of a British dislike for change that runs the gamut from distrust of anything new to outright fear, will be sorely tested by the housing crisis that looms on the horizon. A 23% increase in demand is expected in London alone over the next twenty years, putting extreme pressure on deteriorating housing stock that remains substantially unchanged since the Victorian age, the residential equivalent of the disintegrating Underground and sewer system. Unlike the Netherlands, where public housing is recognized as a basic human need and a key factor in keeping cities healthy and where self-governing housing associations work with local authorities and private owners, new housing in Britain is primarily built by speculating property developers who concentrate on areas where they can maximize the return on their investment.3 There is little profit to be made in the poorest sections of the inner cities or in upgrading or replacing dilapidated council estates. The critical housing skirmishes are now being silently engaged outside the ring roads in the London greenbelt, for example, where inequities in the way that stringent restrictions on growth that have been in place since World War II can increasingly be cited because of the high economic stakes involved. Rather than the NIMBY (not in my backyard) or BANANA (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything) approach that local councils used to take, the size of investments now allowed exceptions.
Isolated classicist essays, such as Robert Adams’s inflated Georgian renderings in the best English country house tradition, are of little or no consequence when viewed in this perspective, being nothing more than attempts by recently prosperous clients to gain social respectability. Serious efforts to confront the real housing issues in Britain are rare indeed. The end of the classicists’ crusade, most tellingly marked by the appointment of Adrian Gale as head of education at the Prince of Wales’ Institute for Architecture, has signaled a return of confidence in other familiar brands and ways of expressing national identity. The search for meaning seems to have led back to the familiar panacea of technological virtuosity, the subliminal recollection of Britain’s industrial hegemony and the empire that supported it as a comforting image at a time of national transition.
Other than the contentious awards being made by the Millennium Commission, which once again avoids radical examples of change, such as Zaha Hadid’s Cardiff Opera House, this unofficial and subliminal re-emphasis on structural determinism, often labeled Hi-tech architecture, should come as no surprise. It was foretold in the choice of Nicholas Grimshaw as the designer of the British Pavilion at Expo ’92 in Seville and the completion of his Waterloo International Terminal in London in the following year. In the rush to compare his terminal to engineering marvels of the past, such as Paddington Station, and to describe the virtuosity of how the 312 foot long canopy reduces from 180 feet to 115 feet wide along a curvature made possible by accordion gaskets, no one has mentioned the major difference in world view. For all its impressive gadgetry, including wiper blades to keep the roof glazing clean, Waterloo International does not elevate the human spirit in the same way that Isambard Kingdom Brunel did in his marvellous train sheds in the Victorian era. The belief in the inspiration inherent in industry is gone, replaced with a hollow attempt to present technology as an end in itself. Perhaps exposing an underlying unwillingness to compromise the cultural safety of insularity, this gateway to the Channel is as mean, cold and uninspiring as the trains themselves, with few physical and psychic creature comforts. A potentially important symbol of linkage to Europe has, consequently, been squandered and all the media hype surrounding it is unjustified.
The Expo ’92 pavilion also foretold a growing emphasis on sustainability, which has now been layered over technological resurgence. Hi-tech now not only equals low energy, but also social awareness, with denial once again evident in the embodied energy contained in most of the materials used. The quest for the Holy Grail of technological salvation from environmental decline has led many high profile architects, in addition to Grimshaw, such as Richard Rogers, Norman Foster and Michael Hopkins, to jump on the sustainability bandwagon with varying degrees of effectiveness. Grimshaw’s Eden project in Cornwall, commissioned by Tim Schmidt to cover abandoned clay pits with a glass enclosure that will allow various ecosystems to be replicated beneath it, runs the risk of becoming a glorified environmental theme park: nature in a pristine package for profit. Michael Hopkins’ movement away from the technically celebratory strategies of the Mound Stand, Lords Cricket Ground in London in the late 80s to the fundamental approach to environmental response seen at Glydebourne that evolved further in the Inland Revenue Centre at Nottingham in 1994 and the new building for the Houses of Parliament in London now underway, defines another, more vernacular, dimension of the trend. Less gadgets and more concentration on substantial strategies, especially related to thermal protection, heating and cooling, and a stronger emphasis on historical reference.
After the spectacular intervention of the Lloyd’s of London Headquarters, which is the city’s equivalent of the Pompidou Centre in Paris and ironically the result of the very power vacuum and market forces that Richard Rogers has been decrying in the media, his major impact on the national psyche has been to show what the capital could be like. Also, ironically echoing the Price of Wales, his vision has focused on opening up the shoreline of the Thames to return to the sense of London being a river city, as it once was. His more recent architecture in the city, such as his Channel 4 Headquarters in London in 1994, has fallen short of such inspiration. One of the local planning boards that took over for the GLC, whose passing he mourns, has compromised his scheme by insisting that other architects be involved in the mixed use brief.
As with his ex-partner Norman Foster, whose wiser vision of a technologically controlled future at Stansted Airport in Essex in 1991, has been followed by more modest interventions, such as his elegant solution for the Sainsbury extension of the Royal Academy, as well as other talented British architects in the past, such as James Stirling, Rogers has found a more encouraging reception abroad. While his new Law Courts, now being completed in Bordeaux, perpetuate and elaborate on the structural formalism of Lloyds, more subtle studies such as his master plan for Majorca show the promise that appropriate technology has in realizing the sustainable dream. Using the same parti as his unsuccessful submission for the Inland Revenue competition of 1992, the Majorca proposal features an impressive array of incremental solutions to environmental degradation on the island, rather than a monolithic technical solution of the Eden project variety.
Such ingenuity as this is also found in the Short and Ford Queens Building of 1993 at De Montfort University, which is more literally Victorian in its detailed references. It demonstrate that in returning to Britain’s glorious industrial past for inspiration, it is the sensitivity to human problems and the desire to use technology to find solutions that is the common bond across the last century, rather than metallic pyrotechnics alone and that caring about people can convey meaning best.
This begs the question of why such Promethean talent, past and present, has not been encouraged in Britain and what the economic upheaval of a more responsive arena in Asia will mean to architects such as Rogers and Foster who have been forced to depend on this alternative to experiment with new ideas. In spite of such high profile projects as Lloyds and Stansted, they have so far not found an adequate outlet for their skills at home. Rogers’ ability to widely publicize his views recently is a promising sign, the public response to the Millennium Dome less so and the enforced mystery surrounding the contents of the great inverted wok is partially to blame for that. The intention to mark the passing of the century with an architectural statement equal to Prince Albert’s Crystal Palace of 1851 speaks volumes about the state of mind of the small political faction behind the Dome. The public consensus that the money being spent on this and other grandiose lottery commission projects might better be diverted to social programmes also reveals that class divisions still prevail in Britain and that there is a general distrust of building projects that hurt, rather than help the people, based on past experience. This also has to do with an ingrained national pre-occupation with value for money. As the architectural teacher and writer Robert Maxwell has described it, ‘The British architect’s scope is far more limited by the duty to provide competent and well crafted buildings. … The British reaction to an architecture of ideas contains an immediate fear of the high cost of ideas and, even more, more of a reprobation of an art that is practiced for the benefit of a professional career but paid for by the client.’3
With the recent decline, or even demise, of the polarization that has existed since 1984, it will be interesting to see if the changing view of the place of architecture in the public realm that the Prince of Wales brought about, abetted by market shocks and the loss of valuable historical heritage, can survive and grow to the extent of developing a popular voice in the direction for this vital aspect of culture in Britain, or whether distrust will overwhelm the interest he has worked so hard to generate. The public, having now been offered such a concerted insight into the machinations behind major commissions in Britain, which have consistently been played out in the press over the last 15 years, will now undoubtedly find it difficult to take new proposals for granted. Architecture, for better or worse, has now become a spectator sport, the logical result of its commodification.