Could we Get Smarter with Brutalist buildings?

The famous 'Get Carter' car park which dominates Gateshead's skyline is being demolished to make way for a new supermarket.

Its architect Owen Luder was on good form on Radio 4's Today programme, clear-eyed and refreshingly unsentimental about its loss, in contrast with the huffing and puffing often heard from architects in similar circumstances.

The car park is/was a fine example of concrete Brutalism and like others of its kind - Luder's now-demolished Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth, RobinHood Gardens etc. - it provokes both love and loathing. But not in equal measure - the popular vote is usually about 10 against to 1 in favour.

The problem with replacing the car park in Gateshead is that it is a 'something' which (if the redevelopment is anything like what one expects today - from the Michael Caine architecture of Luder to the Michael McIntyre designs of the average new retail development) is going to be replaced with a 'nothing' that, as Luder pointed out, is unlikely to generate a national news item when knocked down in 30 years' time.

My former CABE colleague Jon Rouse suggested that the car park's helical circulation, combined with the boy racer proclivities of the Geordies, made it ideally suited to creative re-use as a go-kart facility: 'Get Karting'.

Stirling Prize - wacky vs worthy

This year's candidates for the Stirling Prize have been announced - the usual eclectic mix, from an exotic gallery (in Rome by Zaha Hadid) to a south London school (Clapham Manor by dRMM).

They are all very good, I imagine - they are all RIBA Award winners. And it's not easy to compare apples with pears (although both have an attribute in common with buildings - the inside is often not as appealing as the glossy outside led you to hope).

What do you go for? Celebrate Zaha as the cavalier swansong of the age of bling - or is this the kind of award that confirms the prejudices held by 80% of the public about architecture? Or do you give the prize to Chipperfield's Berlin museum - a sober, roundhead alternative, more in tune with the times.

If I were a judge, I'd be choosing at least partly on political grounds. And with two schools on the list, I think I could see what the shortlisters are getting at - though I'd be worried that they've managed to split the vote in the process.

Give the prize to a school, and show the public the new schools that the Government won't be letting them have any more (unless they have time to build their own). The trouble is, though, that there are lots of quite good new schools. Is any one of them really the best building in the country this year? Probably not - but I'd be happy to accept it as a bit of point scoring.

I'm sure the real judges just go on merit. But... I see William Hill have Zaha as favourite - bet on her if you want, but I won't be.

Mr Bean builds his dream house

Rowan Atkinson has applied for planning permission for a new Richard Meier-designed house in the Oxfordshire countryside.

The usual suspects are lined up on both sides - locals, as reported in the Mail and the Telegraph, are up in arms; but Lord Rogers and Professor Burdett both think it's great.

Couldn't we, just for once, have a controversial modernist project that Lord Rogers, after careful scrutiny of the drawings, decides isn't quite up to scratch; or one that Colonel Sir Tufton Bufton of the Old Rectory is pleasantly surprised to find doesn't conform to his preconceptions, and actually makes a rather wonderful addition to the landscape - in much the same way, now he comes to think about it, that the late Lord Burlington might have chosen to do, were he still with us.

It appears not.

Prefabs to sprout?

The Nasty Party seem to have done away with the possibility of building many proper new schools for the next few years. But demographic pressures, in London at least, won't go away, and there is a growing need for new school places - never mind rebuilding the existing stock. So we can expect a boom in prefab classrooms.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, and it would be a good idea for architects to start thinking about the possibilities. Colin Davies's excellent book The Prefabricated Home (Reaktion, 2005) contains an interesting discussion of architects' various hang ups about mass produced buildings, and highlights a number of examples of architects who have grasped the opportunity to turn prefabs from buildings into architecture, and not just in housing projects, by means of a few cheap but ingenious moves (Nicholas Lacey at Trinity Buoy Wharf, Penoyre and Prasad in Bloomsbury).

When materials and money were in short supply in the decades after the end of WW2, the ingenuity of architects gave us the Hertfordshire schools and low budget housing of considerable quality. Good architects are resourceful and ingenious, and good architecure doesn't necessarily flow from plentiful supplies of stainless steel and polished granite. There's no reason why the coming Age of Austerity shouldn't give us better buildings than we got in the Age of Bling. Unless those in charge think that most money spent on architects's fees is wasted.

To the exhibition 1:1 - architects build small spaces at the V&A. It's on until 30 August and is a pleasure to the mind and the eye, full of charm and inventiveness. Don't miss it.

Seven invited practices from around the world, nearly all unknown to me, demonstrate a wonderful variety of approaches to creating small domestic structures. Delight in geometry, in the manipulation of scale and space, in the qualities of natural materials and in pure tectonics are all in evidence, as well as examples of how responsiveness to cultural context in architecture is not incompatible with the exercising of the imagination (I'm sure you didn't think it was, but building in a conservation area in this country is still more likely to be a problem than an opportunity - but I digress...).

A lesson, perhaps, to those - some of them perhaps in positions of power now - who don't quite get the possibilities of 'delight' in architecture.

Wrong building demolished in Farringdon

A very big hole has appeared in the townscape of Farringdon Road (London EC1), on the corner with Cowcross Street, where a building has been knocked down to allow the construction of the Crossrail station.

Unfortunately, they seem to have knocked down the wrong one.

The one that went was one of those neutral 1960s offices building that no one ever notices, even though it's far bigger than its neighbours. The one they left, to its north, shown above, is a po-mo (post-modern) number from the 1980s. According to the Survey of London this was described by Hugh Pearman as 'Early Learning Centre architecture' and nominated by him as one of the two worst buildings of 1992. It is regularly namechecked as people's least favourite postwar building in London (and there's some competition).

A few years ago, while working for CABE, I was twice involved in trying to find new offices for them. We couldn't pay very high rents, and the space that came up tended to be in office buildings built either in the 1980s or in the 1960s. On more than one occasion, we found half decent space in a 1980s office building that was so embarrassingly awful in its appearance - usually involving shiny purple granite and large balls used prominently somewhere as a decorative element - that we decided we couldn't locate there; each time we went for more neutral examples of 1960s architecture, first at the very plain Elizabeth House in Waterloo, and then at the architecturally superior and slightly more assertive, but still calmly classy, CAA building in Kingsway.

It's a generation thing, I think - maybe Oedipal in origin. Each generation reacts against the tastes of the one before. At the moment, po-mo looks decidedly not the thing, but maybe it will come back. Buildings can be listed, generally speaking, after 30 years, so the earliest 1980s buildings can now be considered. Stirling's No. 1 Poultry, a rather later building, would be top of my list as a London exemplar of the movement.

The building at Farringdon wouldn't be. If the Crossrail project was being run by quality surveyors rather than quantity surveyors, surely a way would have been found of getting rid of this monster.

The view from the back yard

Communities secretary Eric Pickles has written to local authorities to tell them that they should decide on housing numbers, rather than having the numbers dictated via regional targets - as trailed in the Tories' statements before the election. He states that 'it will no longer be possible to concrete over large swathes of the country without any regard to what local people want'.

I wonder what 'local people' those are, then - presumably not the ones looking for somewhere to live.

Tory planning policies (and presumably now the coalition's) have been widely criticised as a nimby's charter. The problem is that most new housing, particularly greenfield housing, is pretty terrible, so the problem is probably not an irrational dislike of new development, but an evidence-based dislike, based on a reasonable guess as to what one is likely to get in one's back yard.

Improving the quality of what gets built is therefore more important than ever, if 'local people' (I'm never quite sure how they differ from 'people') are to be provided with new homes.