Why You Don't Get the Buildings You Want
Why You Don't Get the Buildings You Want
For better and for worse, architecture is not like other products
The British people are not getting the buildings they want. That is the message the think tank Policy Exchange has been trumpeting for several years now. It claims the public dislikes conspicuously modern architecture (“glass bottles”), and tower blocks above all. In a series of reports for the UK’s Conservative government, Policy Exchange has argued there is wide support for its own programme of “Building Beautiful,” which favours lower-rise building, terraced housing and broadly traditional aesthetics.
“What people want,” it says, citing its surveys of popular taste, “is buildings that reflect the history, character and identity of their community and that belong in their surroundings: somewhere, not anywhere.”
The latest initiative in this crusade is a paper by the architect and critic Ike Ijeh, with a forward by Michael Gove, proposing a new school of architecture and planning. This “School of Place” would revive “traditional design principles and techniques,” while teaching students how to factor public preferences into their work at the local level.
This talk of a “critical disconnect” from the public points to the awkward status of architecture in the modern world: a profession that still lays claim to artistic expertise, in an era that honours popularity and choice among its highest ideals. So do architects care about our tastes, and more importantly, should they?
Sadly there hasn’t been much useful discussion on these points, because the most vocal elements in the architecture world have reacted to Building Beautiful in the histrionic terms of contemporary cultural politics. The author and heritage consultant Robert Bevan responded to Ijeh’s recent paper by tarring “beauty” as “a Trojan horse word used by those on the right to discredit the Modernist-tinged post-war settlement,” not to mention an “appeal to nativism.” With an acrobatic use of guilt-by-association, Bevan makes traditional aesthetics out to be an expression of right-wing extremism.
And he is by no means the first to do so. In 2018, for instance, the architect and University of Illinois professor Sam Jacobs wrote a splenetic piece in Dezeen which described Building Beautiful as “sick” no less than three times, accusing it of indulging in “plastic jingoism” for the benefit of “quasi-fascist old white men.”
These polemics notably skirt around the issue of popular preferences, though they do contain an implicit view of architect-public relations. They suggest that public attitudes are essentially something to be shaped by the architect, whether through the nefarious appeal to prejudice or the virtuous ambition, as Jacobs says, to “hard-wire progressive ideas into the fabric of the world.”
We shouldn’t assume these writers speak for the architecture world as a whole. Other critics of Building Beautiful, like Architectural Review’s Tom Wilkinson, have made a more convincing case that aspirations to beautify the built environment are providing cover for the on-going evisceration of Britain’s social housing. Under the current economic regime, the destruction and “regeneration” of ugly tower blocks invariably entails banishing poorer residents from their homes and neighbourhoods.
It’s also worth mentioning that not even Building Beautiful argues public dissatisfaction is only about stylistic preferences, since that would be absurd. The poor quality of new buildings in the UK is largely due to property developers chucking them up as cheaply as possible, with the result that they are often shoddy, generic, and quick to deteriorate. Demanding such buildings look more traditional just means the same uninspiring shoeboxes getting a brick facade and a grid of portrait windows, the fate of many new-builds under the New London Vernacular guidelines of the past decade. Policy Exchange tends to attribute these problems to the planning system; others would say the market is never going to ensure high quality housing for those on low incomes.
Nonetheless, as an observer of the discourse around architecture, my impression is that it doesn’t prioritise public preferences very highly. Social responsibility is generally framed in terms of absolute values like sustainability and equality, the ambition being to meet the historic challenges of the day with forward-thinking, progressive spirit. Hence projects involving traditional elements are normally presented as deconstructing or modernising the past, or justified as an eco-friendly exercise in recycling.
It’s simply wrong to say architects don’t appreciate older styles, but the layman won’t necessarily realise when modern buildings draw on the past for inspiration. Who would have guessed, for instance, that last year’s Serpentine Pavilion, a minimalist black cylinder by Theaster Gates and Adijaye Associates, “draws inspiration from the architectural typologies of chapels and the great kilns of Stoke-on-Trent”? In any case, the stark contrasts we see between older and newer buildings look more ambiguous to those who can locate them in the continuous evolution of a craft.
Naturally, all this can result in architects and connoisseurs having unusual aesthetic intuitions. Consider their passionate resistance against the demolition of the Smithsons’ famous brutalist housing estate, Robin Hood Gardens, in 2017, and the subsequent worship of its salvaged concrete fragments as sacred relics. For the architecture world, that building was a work of immense originality and historic importance, a monument to the achievements of the welfare state, and a heroic effort to protect working-class life from the ravages of a hostile urban environment. To most onlookers, including the politicians who declined to recognise its heritage status, it was a depressing eyesore.
Ultimately some mismatch between supply and demand is inevitable in architecture, because it is a modern cultural form attached to an archaic mode of distribution. Like modern art, literature or even fashion, architecture is a specialised field whose inhabitants maintain their own opaque world of jargon, fads and acquired tastes, with incentives for breaking new ground rather than replaying the best hits. But buildings are not like artworks or books. There’s no way to deliver avant-garde architecture to some people and mass-market architecture to others, since everyone has to look at the same buildings. We can’t really judge buildings as artistic products, seeing as they form a permanent and intimate part of our lives, let alone consume them as novelties to be discarded afterwards.
Clearly this means architects have different responsibilities than artists or fashion designers do, but it would be a mistake to conclude they should simply answer the demands of the majority. The artistic dimension of architecture is crucial to the pursuit of arete, of excellence, without which a culture falls into stagnation and mediocrity. This is the big advantage of architecture being unlike other products: it cannot simply dissolve into the morass of consumer choice mediated by advertising and status anxiety. Buildings are among the last remaining ways that artistic achievement can have a broad impact on culture from outside the echo chamber of popular demand.
Building Beautiful may well be right that people do not generally recognise in contemporary architecture such an achievement. That is a problem, since no building can be considered truly valuable on the basis of real estate listings and professional plaudits alone. If it wants to say something meaningful, it has to speak a language that is widely understood in the place where it stands. It could be, as Ijeh claims, that new institutions are needed to bring architects and planners into a more productive dialogue with the public, the obvious problem being that the public are not normally the ones who commission buildings.
There are other reasons to believe this gap will not be closed easily. The strange thing about the Building Beautiful philosophy is that many of its principles have been current since the 1970s. Movements like Critical Regionalism reject the technocratic formulas of Modernism, and look for a synthesis of modern architecture and local context to create a sense of identity and place. But it seems to me this project has been much more successful in non-western countries (though admittedly I’m not best placed to judge). Consider, for instance, the Virgilio Barco Library in Bogotá, the wonderfully landscaped Sancaklar Mosque near Istanbul, or the Krushi Bhawan civic center in Bhubaneswar, India.
Some recent projects in London have attempted a similar synthesis, such as Hackney New Primary School, or the new studios at the Royal College of Art. I like these buildings, but I question whether a wider public would agree with me. I’m left wondering if there is something about the history, cultural tensions or class structure of a country like Britain that makes it difficult for modern architecture and local identity to find common ground.