Still waiting for the modern world

Saturday's Guardian profile of EH boss Simon 'It's absolute nonsense to say that I'm a fogey!' Thurley notes that his new book The Building of England has been criticised for ending at 1940, and cites The Times's Richard Morrison's claim that 'he stops his survey after 1930...but most of us live and work in an England built since then.'

Which made me wonder whether (depending on who the 'us' in 'most of us' might be) the latter claim is in fact true.

There must be a date such that half the buildings in the country were built before that year, and half after.  What is that date?  Quite a lot was built during the 1930s - for example major suburban extensions to many towns and cities - and my guess is that the answer lies around 1930-1940 - certainly a significant amount of the country's building stock is from the interwar period.

But there are many places where you see very few buildings built since the Second World War; and many small towns and villages where little has been built since the nineteenth century.  You can travel for many miles through much of England and see nothing built in your lifetime.  In such places, anything new comes as a surprise.

A 1930s building such as Peter Jones in Sloane Square (pictured above) might, according to my estimate, sit in around the fiftieth percentile of buildings by age.  But it still looks strikingly 'modern', and would be described as such by many (and might still struggle to find favour with Kensington and Chelsea's planning committee if put forward as a new project today - too big, out of character with its heritage setting, untested young architect, monotonous curtain walling, surely Chelsea deserves better than this drone drone etc etc).

The proportion of buildings in most parts of the metropolis, let alone elsewhere, that look 'modern', is still very small.   To architects, designing a 'modern' building is to conform to a model that has existed for about a hundred years or so; but to civilians, such buildings are still not seen as the norm, because the pace of change is so slow; and 'modernism' is still seen by many as a foreign import, as it has been ever since it appeared.  Classicism was a foreign import too, but like the Normans and then the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas, it has been around long enough to have been accepted. Modernist projects today can find themselves subject to the xenophobic, or worse, 'you're not from round these parts, are you?' strain of thinking that can still be found all over England (admirers of John Landis' An American Werewolf in London (1981) will recall the scene set in the Slaughtered Lamb).

But the pace of change in the world of 'heritage protection' has been quite different.  While the idea of listing postwar buildings was seen as pretty controversial only two or three decades ago, now almost anything built more than thirty years ago must be fretted over as a potential 'heritage asset' (neither word in this ghastly but cunning term was used in relation to old buildings a few decades ago - they were just old buildings, the best of which were listed).

There is very little evidence of popular interest in preserving postwar buildings - the attendees at an average Twentieth Century Society meeting are a bit, well, specialist - but then Georgian and Victorian architecture needing saving by zealots when it was under threat a few decades ago, and we can thank them that we still have St Pancras.  The problem is in keeping focussed on the good stuff, rather than objecting to the demolition of almost anything.  Conservation areas and listed buildings are meant - by law - to be 'special' .  If more than half of the country's building stock is, or is part of, a 'heritage asset', we are in danger of devaluing the whole thing (as paragraph 127 of the National Planning Policy Framework, for example, warns local authorities to avoid).  If it's 'modern' it might indeed be heritage; the corollary, in danger of being overlooked, is that if it's a bit old, it nevertheless might not be heritage.

The Guardian article considers these tensions between the old and new in 'heritage', and observes that Thurley, the 'ostensible fogey...is English brutalism's greatest champion'.

In this country, planning judgments about design and heritage are made in theory on the basis of policies and guidance that their promulgators like to claim are rigorous and objective, but in practice are made up on the hoof and on the basis of whimsy, and not a great deal of knowledge or sound judgement.

It is in the area of 'coming to terms with the modern' - with which the English have been struggling for about 100 years - that this is most apparent of all.

Blank looks at Debenhams in Oxford Street

A current makeover of Debenhams department store in Oxford Street involves overcladding the very dull 1960s elevations of a building described in the Pevsner guide as 'big and dispiriting' with a 'kinetic facade' of suspended aluminium panels, which are intended to ripple in the breeze.

When I walked past, there was drizzle but no breeze, and not much rippling going on - the effect was plain and static, rather than lively as indicated in the publicity - no doubt it will be better on a day that is both sunny and windy.

When a dull building that one has walked past many times has gone, it's hard to remember what it was like. The wonders of Street View (which the idle who use it for virtual site visits should always remember illustrates the recent past, not the present) show the old elevations of windows in vertical strips, alternating with strips of concrete cladding - pretty dispiriting even to a concrete enthusiast, and clearly a candidate for a makeover.

But while this project has given Debenhams a bit of bling, it's taken away the windows.  Was that such a good idea?  Many 1960s department stores that are even more dreary than the old-look Debenhams were built without windows altogether, but all of London's best stores, whether trad or modern - Harrods, Selfridges, Peter Jones - have elevations that are fully fenestrated.  Of course not much use is made of the windows, but that's not really the point - they are there just to give the illusion of the possibility of views in or out. From the outside it is generally not possible to tell whether they are used as 'real' windows or not, and I think that where you can see in through one or two windows, you are fooled into thinking you can see in through the rest. In fact, of course, windows don't generally afford much of a view into houses, flats or offices.

Windows at the upper levels make department stores into civilised, neighbourly city buildings.  You don't get sham windows on a retail park.

A city can take the odd store without windows - Birmingham's Selfridges is the highlight of an otherwise bland collection of retail buildings.  But Oxford Street has many big stores - what if they all followed suit? We know by now that form following function is not such a great precept.

The step-free world - can it have a downside?

Changing the built environment to allow step-free access - an exercise which is costing a huge amount of money, and if you consider London's tube network, has really only just begun - is a good thing.  I have pushed buggies and I still push a wheelchair from time to time, and the world has got better over the last few decades for the millions of us who do this.

But the move to Flatworld is not without a downside, and this doesn't seem to be discussed much.

Making the world safe for wheelchairs and buggies has also made the pavements safe for tourists with luggage on wheels that is too heavy to lift; for badly controlled infants on scooters and badly behaved adults on roller blades (and bicycles); and, in a further contribution to the continuing atrophying of human muscle power, for the Segway.

Anything that had George W Bush as a famous early adopter needs to be looked at with suspicion.























Here at Port Soller in Mallorca, for example, a huge sum of public money has been spent in recent years on public realm improvements along the waterfront.  It is all to a high standard, and as we expect of such projects now, everything is step-free.

And so a shop on the waterfront offers Segway tours - which would not have been possible before the improvements.  You get to see the waterfront, like on foot but faster, and to the irritation of pedestrians.

There are two main downsides to step free access.

First, letting onto the road anyone who has a good reason to be on wheels on the pavement - such as a wheelchair user - for example to cross a side street via dropped kerbs - has the undesirable consequence of letting anyone who should be on the road - such as a cyclist - more readily onto the pavement.  And it makes the use of things such as roller blades on pavements, not always found on the feet of considerate people, easier for those who want to do so.  The general elision of the world of the road and the world of the pavement - in principle a good thing, in the introduction of the shared surface  - encourages the take-up of new things that don't obviously belong to one or the other, like the versions of infants' scooters that are used by grown ups - some versions of which are powered.

The second, related downside is less activity for the able bodied, particularly if they are predisposed to avoid physical effort, as most of us are.  Someone in a wheelchair needs a lift to get the first floor - the able bodied don't, but they tend to use the lift anyway - and most new buildings are arranged to hide the stairs away.  Encouraging walking by improvements to the built environment is a public policy objective intended to improve health, but there are all sort of things that make it easier not to get incidental exercise, such as by climbing stairs or carrying bags, than it used to be.

While shoes with integral wheels don't seem to have caught on yet for the adult market, this may just be the result of an image problem, as so far they have mainly been aimed at children.  But that doesn't seem to put off grown-up roller bladers and skateboarders.  As it becomes more and more practical to get from home to work with wheels on your feet, the practical means will surely soon be provided for everyone to do this.  

The Incas knew about the wheel, but used it only for small objects with no practical use, like toys.  No flat surfaces to use wheels on, you see.  The Incas didn't last.  The future appears to be flat.

At Golden Lane: old wine in new bottles

The postwar Golden Lane Estate, on the northern edge of the City of London, is more lovable and more human than its later and bigger cousin at the Barbican (though both are good, with plenty to inspire those designing high density housing today).

Golden Lane has also been been more extensively customised (before listing put a stop to all that at both estates), most notably in the case of the Shakespeare pub - originally a modern design admired by Ian Nairn, but now with an Olde England pubbe makeover, complete with retro joinery mouldings, repro carriage lamps and twiddly typography on the fascia (the big sans serif lettering on the white wall on the right looks original).



















It's hardly surprising, of course - the modernist pub, as opposed to bar, is an oddity that has never found much favour.  A rather fine postwar example in St John's Wood, the Rossetti, on the corner of Queens Grove and Ordnance Hill, with open plan split level bars, did flourish - it was knocked down and replaced by as banal a neo-Geo housing block as Westminster City Council have ever approved, which is going some.

Across town, at the 1950s Churchill Gardens estate in Pimlico - which should also be on the study tour - the architects spared a Victorian pub from demolition and put up modern slab blocks around it: securing the pub's long term future, rather than 'harming its setting' as might be claimed if you tried the same thing today; adding to the richness of the townscape; and avoiding the problem of how to design a modern pub.

As with the half-timbered neo-Tudor bar fit-outs that you can find inside modern air terminals at Heathrow and Gatwick, there's something faintly disturbing about the kind of 'old in new' conjunction found at the Shakespeare.  Frank Duffy's formulation of 'Shell, Services, Scenery and Set' explained how buildings and bits of buildings are replaced on progressively shorter cycles (for offices, perhaps 50, 15, 5 years, and a few weeks or months respectively).  When you find the 'Shell' of a 500 year old crumbling stone building in the centre of Rome fitted out with a crisp and shiny new shopfront with bronze glazing bars ('Scenery'), that seems like the natural order of things, and you're relieved that Roman Heritage or whoever deals with such matters hasn't insisted on timber stall risers and bolection mouldings - as they might have done in some places I can think of.  Modern interventions in old buildings brought out and bring out the best in some architects. Carlo Scarpa was better when intervening in something interesting that was there already than when starting from scratch; similarly Haworth Tomkins are an example of present-day London architects who do their best work in existing buildings (putting them in the same sentence as Scarpa should prevent this observation being read as criticism).  The Shakespeare's fit out did not bring out the best in anyone.

But cheer up - a few doors up from the Shakespeare in Goswell Road you can find original Golden Lane shopfronts with original typography, still looking good (and with the original three-letter phone code too).

Like many architects, probably, I find myself conflicted between the instinct that a visually well-ordered world is better than the alternative, and the feeling that there's a limit to how much you can hope to, or should, exert control on aesthetic grounds on what happens in the environment  (see the entire UK planning system passim).  Corbusier's Frugès housing at Pessac was good when it looked coherent; so, for different reasons, was the pimped-up people's Pessac that followed.  If (as I suspect from a Streetview inspection) architect-y types are moving in there and trying to restore it to its original state, then perhaps a free market in coherence can exist after all - although the Second Law of Thermodynamics suggests this is unlikely to happen to any great extent.

The issues are made clearer by considering Duffy's formulation.  Shells should be controlled; Sets (the flowers and sandwich board in the picture above, for example) obviously shouldn't be (though I think they may be in Singapore). The Shakespeare's Scenery - old wine in new bottles - is in the contentious zone between the two.

At Kidbrooke Village

Estate regeneration - mainly, knocking down and starting again - is taking place, or planned, on a massive scale across many of the biggest postwar public housing estates all over London.

Last week, developers Berkeley organised a morning of talks and tours at Kidbrooke in Greenwich, where the Ferrier Estate, built forty years ago by the GLC and now in the hands of Greenwich Council, is being demolished and turned into a mixed tenure development, at about twice the density of the old housing.  That ratio appears to be typical for such schemes, the 50% of housing for sale helping to pay for the 50% of affordable housing, reprovided in the same total amount as before.

Work has been going on for four years now - the first phases, of an admirably high standard of design and finish, are occupied, and the last of the old buildings were being flattened in front of our eyes.

The Ferrier, very isolated from surrounding areas, had become notorious for physical and social problems as early as the late 1980s, but when the first tenants had moved in less than 20 years earlier, they loved it (or at least there is film of tenants saying they loved it) - as was often the case with such housing.

In today's redevelopments, there is much emphasis on social as well as environmental and economic sustainability, and Berkeley are promoting studies of how this can be achieved in developments of this kind - undertaken here by Social Life, an offshoot of the Young Foundation.

Much work in sociology concerns the built environment, but one can't help suspecting that connections between the different professions and disciplines generally remain poor, and studies such as this one rare.  Former LCC architect John Partridge's account of his involvement in the design of the seminal housing estate at Roehampton - another estate, much of which is listed, now due to be regenerated - mentions the involvement of a sociologist on the LCC staff in the 1950s as if that were not a particularly unusual thing. It would, one suspects, be unusual now, yet one can't help wondering how much the social consequences of the redevelopment of many of these estates is being dealt with at a deeper level than that of a wing and a prayer.

Typically, such places were cut off from their surroundings and quite different in almost every way: appearance, tenure, social mix etc.  Now they are being reintegrated with their surrounding physically, and monocultural tenures are being replaced by more mixed forms.  But the enterprise could still be described as 'experimental' - a term often used in the past as a criticism of failed housing schemes, such as Robin Hood Gardens, though  in fact there was seldom any research or any findings.  But if things were properly monitored, that surely would be a good thing.  The new Kidbrooke Village, with good looking buildings and the lavish landscape that Berkeley have learnt makes good marketing sense, feels a long way away from the bleak housing it has replaced.  One hopes that studies such as those being carried out by Social Life will continue through the remaining twenty years or so of rebuilding that remains.

An architectural family tree at Cannon Street - the song remains the same

Peter Frame's Rock Family Trees are a delight for music geeks - and appear to be a nice little earner for their author and artist.  Someone should do the same for postwar UK architecture - though I suppose the market might be a bit more limited.

An example of an architectural family get-together can be seen at Cannon Street.  The powerful exoskeleton of Foggo Associates' new building over Cannon Street Station (centre of picture) has a clear affinity with its neighbour, Arup Associates' 80 Cannon Street of 1972-6 (the Pevsner guide calls the latter a 'startling tower', though rather more startling towers have appeared in the vicinity since that was written...).

Foggo Associates emerged in 1989 from Arup Associates, where Peter Foggo (who died in 1993) and his team had been responsible for many of the latter's most notable projects through the 1970s and 80s.

The recent reminiscing prompted by Lady Thatcher's death has reminded us how much there was that was awful about the 1980s.  Arup Associates' work from that decade showed them unable resist the tide of PoMo, and included the part of Broadgate covered in stuck-on granite framing, seen above - one of the more dignified commercial projects of that decade, but nevertheless unlikely to be regarded as highly by posterity as projects such as 1 Finsbury Avenue nearby - which was only a year or two earlier, but really the swan song of Arup's more rigorous 70s style.  Other 1980s projects by Arup Associates, such as the building at Bristol Harbourside, also look rather dated, at least in parts, and suggest that being 'civic' was not their forte - whatever one thinks of the whole sorry saga of Paternoster Square, it's probably for the best that their scheme for that site remained unbuilt.

The new Cannon Street building can be seen as a return to form for the Arup family - a welcome contrast to the skin deep architecture that is so prevalent elsewhere.

Rock family tree comparisons spring readily to mind - for example, the embarrassment of Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant, a hero of the 60s and 70s, getting himself a new wave perm in the Thatcher years - but fully redeemed by his own remarkable return to form more recently.

Are tall buildings blighting our skyline?

To the RIBA / Observer debate on tall buildings, where we hear from Rowan Moore and Simon Jenkins (two journalists), who think tall buildings are a blight, and from Julia Barfield and Peter Rees (two professionals), who don't.

For such a subject that is so emotive - at least in architectural and planning circles -  it was a surprisingly even-tempered and consensual occasion, with everyone, panel and audience, lay and professional, basically agreeing that the answer to the question 'are tall buildings blighting our skyline?' is that the ugly ones are and the beautiful ones aren't; and that it would be nice if there was a bit more planning to counter the opportunism of the promoters of projects.

Moore thought that the London Plan sets out the right policies and quality standards, but that many project that have been built or approved fail to meet these policies and standards.  Rees made the slightly odd assertion that you shouldn't build high unless it is necessary to do so (why not?), but that it is necessary in the City because there is no spare land, so you should make sure you do it well.  Barfield pointed out that you can't blight a skyline with beautiful buildings, and reminded us that the best tall buildings are listed.  Jenkins' view was that the argument is about planning, not architecture, and that the 'pass was sold' long ago.

For Jenkins, the problem is that there is no one to dictate what the skyline should be like.  Your blogger pointed out from the floor that dictating is best done by dictators - my thinking being that lack of consensus is part of the problem. Is the fact that some people don't want these things - almost certainly a minority - enough to stop those who want to build them, who are doing so because they are providing offices and flats that are wanted?  And in spite of the theoretical consensus about stopping the ugly ones, there is less agreement than you might think about which those are.

This was a room full of people who cared about the subject; most don't.  The self-selecting audience - with those admitting to being architects, in a show of hands prompted by Simon Jenkins who thought he was in the lions' den, forming only about a quarter of those present - answered 'no' by a clear majority to the proposition.

The most chilling observation of the evening, almost certainly accurate, came from Rowan Moore, who suggested that the planning car crash that is the 'emerging Vauxhall cluster' of towers is a result of a development zone being on the border of two local authorities (Lambeth and Wandsworth), the politicians of each of which are prepared to let rip, in development terms, because there are few voters nearby who care, and other areas of the boroughs will benefit from what Jenkins referred to as the 'bribes' (Section 106 etc.) that smooth the path of these things.