Any style you like as long as it’s modern
I think the conventional wisdom among urban designers is that architectural style doesn’t matter much. Other things being equal, a beautiful building is preferable to an ugly building. But this issue, and the matter of whether the architecture is Late Modern or neoClassical, Hightech or Regional Vernacular, tutti frutti or plain vanilla, are unimportant compared to its response to urban design issues such as massing, site planning, building lines, space enclosure, ground floor uses. Get those things right, I think most urban designers would say, and you can design it in any style you like. This is the typical response to criticism of the sentimental architecture of Poundbury, for instance.
Designing in the correct style is, however, an important matter for architects. It is after all an area over which they claim to exercise sole professional authority. This difference in the valuation given to style can make it difficult for an urban designer teaching in an architecture studio. I’m frequently criticising students’ dramatic object-building schemes from an urban design point of view, and it often feels as if we are speaking different languages.
The Architects’ Journal is claiming victory in its campaign to retain a clause in the Government’s new Planning Policy Statement no.7 which allows the normal ban on new residential development in the countryside to be circumvented in the case of large new one-off “country houses”. Viewed in terms of the responsibility of the planning system to contribute towards social equity, this is bad enough. That a Labour government should give a loophole to a rich elite, to enable them to occupy hundreds of acres of rural land, that is denied to the other 99% of us, is reactionary enough to make one send back one’s party membership card, if one hadn’t already done so.
But another extraordinary aspect of the new PPS7 clause is that it is reworded so as to restrict new “country houses” to those built in a modernist style. No more neoPalladian or neoGrecian monuments, only modern ones. At least, that is the interpretation widely put upon the ODPM’s criteria of “outstanding and ground-breaking” and “highest standards in contemporary architecture”, and it was certainly the AJ’s overt wish.
There is of course a wonderful irony here. As Tom Wolfe[i] and many others have observed, modern architecture, which was created by European socialists as a revolutionary ethical tool for social reform, long ago become an aesthetic, which while by no means restricted to the rich, has certainly acquired a capacity to signify wealth, privilege and exclusiveness.
Government planning policy increasingly recognises the importance of good design, and increasingly tries, with some success, to specify in words what that actually is. But this appears to be the first time that policy has defined good design in a way that prescribes certain styles and excludes others. I look forward to this principle of modernist taste being tested in a planning appeal.
But surely these rural goings-on, while entertaining, are nothing to do with us urban designers? We continue to talk about the real urban issues - mixed uses, density, urban form - and let the style ideologues argue it out among themselves. Except that a worrying precedent was set by last year’s inquiry decision on London Bridge Tower, Renzo Piano’s “Shard”. Here the Inspector decided that the outstanding architectural quality of the proposal was sufficient for it to override valid objections to it on urban design grounds by English Heritage and others. Architectural style is not always a peripheral issue; sometimes it can be counted as more important than good planning.
Endpiece, Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House London: Jonathan cape. 1982.