Architecture Armageddon went on to attract the highest viewing figures ever recorded for a Late Show production. It also sparked a controversy about whether or not the architectural profession really is in decline. That question remains, as Martin Pawley reports four years later.

Revisiting Architecture Armageddon is a painful experience. Perhaps because the National Lottery and the new government have proved that its pessimism was mistaken. Perhaps because it is clear now why it offended so many architects, art historians and arts administrators – who do not easily forgive or forget when their livelihood and raison d’être are called into question. Perhaps because it was made at the nadir of professional fortunes in the slump that followed the frantic 1980s building boom. After all, 1994 was a time when house prices were falling for the first time in sixty years and nearly two million homeowners were in the throes of negative equity. 1994 was the year when Olympia and York, developers of the spectacular million square metre Canary Wharf project in London’s Docklands, finally called in the receivers. It was the year when the so-called ‘office overhang’ – the amount of unlet commercial floor space in London – topped 10 million square metres. In that very, very bad year for architecture who would welcome a TV film that said this was terminal, the beginning of the end for the 4,000 year old profession of architecture?
The argument behind the script of Architecture Armageddon – incidentally this was the producer, James Kent’s title, I argued for Decline and Fall because I said that architecture wasn’t putting up a fight – is simple to reconstruct. It stepped off from the inexplicable ascendancy of Prince Charles in the 1980s, which is still as good a starting point as any from which to consider the multifarious and appalling downfall of architects. Just ten years before the making of Architecture Armageddon, when they considered themselves to be a corps of highly trained professionals, they had been reduced to public and media ridicule by the Prince’s famous ‘Carbuncle’ speech, itself no more than a cheeky deb-soc item cobbled together by a gang of young fogeys. Cheeky it might have been, but it was greeted with such approbation that the Prince went on to form his own Institute of Architecture – in competition with the 150 year-old Royal Institute of British Architects patronized by the Queen, his Mother – then open his own School of Architecture, then promised to launch his own magazine called Perspectives on Architecture – an organ that it was claimed would outsell any other architectural magazine by being sold at a rock-bottom price at the checkouts in all Sainsbury’s supermarkets.
In view of the way the Prince’s challenge subsequently fizzled out, none of this should have frightened the architectural profession, but in 1994 it did. Architects dread being characterized by their critics as arrogant, and hotly deny ‘making ordinary people feel stupid’, as the Prince insisted that they did. Architects hate being unpopular for any reason because their large numbers and their lack of political influence already ensure them poor career prospects. The spectre of unpopularity surfaced repeatedly in the film.
Back in 1971, when Robin Hood Lane, the high-rise GLC housing estate near the northern entrance to the Blackwall Tunnel designed by Alison and Peter Smithson was completed, local people showed their disapproval by shitting in the lifts. This story, recounted by Peter Smithson himself with a shock undimmed by the passage of 23 years, had a 1990 sequel, in which the architect David Chipperfield described the deadly opposition of the ‘suburban tribe’ that attacked a Modern house he had designed for a photographer in West London. Times had changed between 1971 and 1990: instead of shitting in his garden the people who did not like Chipperfield’s building wrote letters to Prince Charles demanding that it be pulled down.
Underlying the fear of unpopularity in the profession in 1994 was the dread of growing numbers. In 1994 there were some 28,000 registered architects in Britain, with 1,500 more graduating every year from 40 schools of architecture. In 1993, according to a survey carried out by the Association of Consultant Architects, 44 per cent of these registered architects were unemployed: a shattering figure, probably exceeded as a proportion of the total only by the number of coal miners out of work. Indeed, like unemployed miners, unemployed architects in the early 1990s lived in a twilight world where their defining activity had ceased. They subsisted on a diet of shelved or cancelled feasibility studies, competitions for the design of buildings that had little, if any hope of being built, so-called ‘eyewash projects’ like the Manchester Olympic bid or ‘Croydon 2000’, that commanded acres of media space to no avail, with at the end of it all, only the prospect of emigration to find work overseas.
In another sense the vulnerability of the architectural fashion dated from the coming to power of Margaret Thatcher, for that was the event that put an end to large scale public spending on buildings for social welfare – the mainstay of the profession which had been so greatly enlarged to undertake utopian social tasks after World War Two that by the 1960s it employed almost as many architects as the National Health Service employed doctors. Too bad for them. From the beginning of the 1980s Local Authority architects departments began to be privatized and salaried architects began losing their jobs, a process that continues to this day. At the same time the Conservative government began to browbeat the profession’s institute into abandoning its fixed scale of fees, a gentlemanly arrangement that had previously relieved its members of the necessity to compete with one another.
Of course none of these blows would have mattered if architects had still been deemed to possess invaluable skills, like doctors or policemen. But the 1980s private sector building boom was brief, focusing on office building, conservation work, out of town shopping centres, science parks and warehousing only for a time. In 1987 the housing market stumbled, the stock exchange crashed, and the economy began to unravel at terrifying speed. By 1990 the construction industry was heading for the worst recession since the Second World War and the profession was fighting for its life.

The coming together of vast numbers of architects competing for very little work, burdened now with the enhanced productivity of computer aided design (enabling one architect to do the work of ten), showed the profession how few friends it had left. At the popular level, notwithstanding the efforts of Prince Charles, what architects actually did had become incomprehensible. People looked bemused at remote terminals of the media industry that resembled country cottages. They pondered over merchant banks made out of department stores. When they looked at apartment buildings they saw former nineteenth century warehouses, and when they looked at what was called a modern electronic office complex with underground parking for 300 cars, they found it resembled a row of grand Georgian riverside houses.
By the end of the 1980s, as though to set the scene for an architectureless future, all recognizable categories of building except private houses, petrol stations and ‘big shed’ distribution centres, had disappeared. In the process all authentic differences between historical periods had also been lost: their ‘strata’ compressed by simplification as though by a tremendous seismic force. So far had this process gone that I predicted in 1994 that within ten years no one would know whether the SOM buildings on Bishopsgate in the City of London had been built in 1881 or 1991, and it would not matter. The veteran American comedian George Burns once said of acting; ‘The most important thing is honesty. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.’ In 1994 I argued that those few architects still working were taking his advice. They were not designing buildings, they were faking history.
Wherever new buildings were erected inside ancient towns and cities, the conservation lobby was pacified by the retention of old facades (or the construction of new copies of old facades), with modern office floorspace behind. Out of town, ‘Big Shed’ techniques of highly mechanized ‘fast-track’ construction ruled. Techniques that depended on rigorous project management – something that architects were not renowned for. The architects who worked on these projects were not professionals in the accepted sense. They were employed by building contractors, not patrons, and were described as ‘design sub-contractors’, or ‘technical contractors’, ranking alongside plumbers, roofers, steel erectors and mechanical and electrical engineers. The buildings that resulted from this reversal of roles were immediately recognizable. In their combination of size and blandness they were in effect ‘deculturalized’. Their appearance was what the Classical Revival architect Robert Adam called ‘monster cottage style’, which was not only a good descriptor, but an ironic epitaph for a profession threatened by a Prince devoted to the cause of historic and vernacular architecture.

Today

This was the scenario painted by Architecture Armageddon. What has happened to it today? The short answer is not very much, for architects are not simply undergoing changing circumstances, they are the victims of a Malthusian tragedy of overpopulation. Their numbers are still growing uncontrollably, a pattern followed since the Second World War. By 1950 there were half as many again as there had been in 1939. By 1974, twice as many as in 1950. To this day the rate of increase in their numbers has not slackened. There are more architectural students in Britain than ever before. Some 9,000 in fact – studying for seven years, as long as doctors. When they qualify, they will push the number of architects up to well over 30,000 with an increased life expectancy to match – four times as many architects as once served the whole of the British Empire – not to mention the 300,000 EC architects eligible to compete for nearly all their jobs.
One wonders, as one sees these students earnestly developing their projects in Britain’s finest schools, what future they see for themselves. Will they become architectural critics? Will they work for English Heritage? Will they be recycled into professors themselves and go on to train yet more architects? What role will they will play in a construction industry geared to produce a value-for-money de-culturalized ‘big-shed’ environment, cheaper than the cheapest architecture money can buy? Students, breeding like rabbits, preparing for what?
With the exception of the retreat of the Prince of Wales (his Institute in decline, his school of architecture denied professional recognition, his magazine defunct), all the abrasive elements explored in Armageddon are still at work, sandpapering the bigger and bigger architectural profession into a smaller and smaller role. All that has masked the progress of this erosion of status since 1994 has been the concatenation of two trivial mysteries, the National Lottery and the Millennium.

The Lottery

The United Kingdom National Lottery was launched in November 1994. Its effect upon architecture was almost immediate. Once it was discovered that the rules governing the awards of Lottery money to ‘good causes’ more or less guaranteed that the ‘good cause’ was bound to be a building, architects leapt at the opportunity. By the beginning of 1996 it was calculated that a quarter of all registered architects were at work on Lottery projects, their feverishly cooked up schemes attracting £700 million in funding a year from just two of the five disbursing bodies, the Arts Council and the Millennium Commission. Today architects are wading through a sea of Millennium Domes, opera houses, eco-centres, earth centres, restored country houses, sports centres, giant statues of Winston Churchill, indoor cricket centres, art galleries, museums, open air sculpture parks, new spires for cathedrals and so on. All of this might be fairly be described as meaningless trash to the value of £3.5 billion. It would be a national tragedy were it not for the fact that some architects have got work from it.
When combined with the new government’s grim determination to celebrate the Millennium in the style of The Great Gatsby, the absurdity of the situation is plain even to the architects who benefit from it. As Colin St. John Wilson, the architect of the British Library, recently told a newspaper; ‘The millennium is a fantastic world where everybody is behaving like Prince Charles, talking to housewives about the best place to put the fridge one minute, and banging on about the timeless art of the Parthenon the next. If we really want Millennium ‘grand projects’ like the French, we will have to put somebody in charge. If we don’t, nothing will ever get finished.’

Already this prediction is coming true. The Lottery was, and remains, an architectural Klondike, but it has not led to the erection of buildings of great social utility, or the restoration of Britain’s sorely decayed urban infrastructure. The nearest it has come to that has been to get far too excited about turning an old power station into an art gallery. What the Lottery has really created has been its own administrative structure, an organization as Byzantine as the Inland Revenue. Starting with the commissioners from the arts councils, sports councils, heritage memorial fund, millennium fund and the charities board, it has built up a fantastic network of administrators, officers, clerks, consultants, technical advisors, regional representatives and the like out of thin air. Extending this web from the other side, as it were, it has also brought into existence an even larger army of highly paid accountants and business planners, advisers on Lottery applications, fund raisers, form-fillers, interpreters of advisory notes, drummers up of letters of support, informal approachers and exploratory telephone callers. English architecture is now entirely in the grip of this bizarre ministry of chance, an administrative octopus from which only European Monetary Union will enable it to tear itself free.

The future

The unseemly spectacle of too many architects competing for too little work, whether it be 1980s superbanks or 1990s Lottery pavilions, is never edifying. While they posture like professionals while stabbing each other in the back, they know in their heart of hearts that their plight is not wholly, nor even primarily a matter of economic pressure. At heart the marginalization and degradation of architecture stems from a collapse of its intellectual authority. From that failure came the conservation movement and the fashion for stylistic revivals that followed it. From it too came the split that now separates architects from planners, who were once their natural allies.
With terrifying speed architects have collapsed their own semantic space and become marginalized in their own environment. Bigger and more expensive buildings, fast track construction methods, new energy and information technology, Computer Aided Design, and the soaring cost of insuring themselves against bigger and bigger claims for negligence, have driven more and more of them to seek the security of managed contracts. CAD alone has wrought a transformation. Producing architectural drawings accounts for half of the design cost of any new building. Now it is a largely automated process, along with specification writing and cost estimating. In recent years, from being as labour intensive as a symphony orchestra, architecture has become as capital intensive as synthesized music. The result has been a creative trap for in so far as project management can control cost, it also ensures the priority of buildability over design. And the result is eerily evident, not perhaps in the most lavish excesses of Lottery or Millennium architecture, but in the workaday environment of new, deculturalized machine buildings that are emerging from Design and Build contracts all over the country. Today Design and Build accounts for half of all new floor space, and as a result it is generating a population of monster ‘post-architectural’ buildings decked out with ‘features’ but with no overall organic design. Ruled by general contractors and their contract manager employees, the architects of these buildings are no more than contract designers, as interchangeable as light bulbs. As the concluding words of the script of Architecture Armageddon put it; ‘Will they ever understand what power, what authority, what respect the architects who were their forefathers held in their hands.’

The end

The electronic age means an entirely new value system for buildings. A value system that is diametrically opposed to the Art Historical tradition of permanence and high value. A value system that requires that the act of building must become, not more and more fraught with cultural significance, triple-stage competitions and endless pontificating by critics, but more and more liberated, valueless and impermanent. Either that, or it is going to be replaced by an entirely different kind of space-enclosing technology: one that requires no space at all.
The driving force behind this impending collapse of the permanent and expensive in favour of the ephemeral and cheap, is electronic information technology with its new media. Something that is already all around us, invisible, overwhelming, uncontrolled. Today even a rotating ‘World Sign’ advertising hoarding shows us a kind of information ‘overcladding’ that could easily convert the whole urban scene, new and old, into a variable identity environment with no architecture at all. The skirmishing over planning permission for active advertising signs is the beginning of a war between historic, static architecture and the new media. The new media are not disposed to coexist with the culture of architecture – they are disposed to overwhelm it. The new media are already, and always have been, supra-architectural. What confronts architecture now is not a new style, a new way of building or a re-ordering of the heirarchy of profession and industry in the construction process, but something far more fundamental. A new conception of reality.
What is architectural design? It is no more than servicing technology expressed as enclosed floorspace. There need be no ‘creative’ or ‘intellectual’ component to it at all. What real artist would ever poll the public, the way architects do, to find out whether his or her work is any good or not?
Building a building is more like winning an election than writing a book. It is a process involving a cast of thousands, only one of whom, the architect, is ever trying to achieve anything original. In the next century architects will move away from meretricious claims of creativity and ‘meaning’. They will follow the advice of the perspicacious Adolf Loos, who wrote a century ago; ‘We have enough original geniuses, why don’t we repeat ourselves endlessly instead?’
Why not indeed? Because of the loss of ‘creativity’? Laser effects will take care of that. What will remain for architecture will be pure serviced floor space: the ‘No time, no money, no details’ architecture of Rem Koolhaas. It will be the ‘zero-defect’ architecture referred to by the senior partner of one of the largest firms of architects in the United States when he said; ‘If architecture today is already something like a hundred times more precise than it was in the 1960s, it will need to exceed that by another hundred times by the 2060s. And that means losing a profession and finding an industry.’